11-27-2015 Split hive didn't make it

We were down for thanksgiving yesterday and checked on the hive.  The silver top hive was going pretty strong and even had bees in the top hive box.  But, the hive that was made from a split was toast.  There was a big pile of bees on the bottom screen.  Probably should have been feeding them more.

The plan for next year should probably be to re-queen this hive and get another queen for a second hive for a split.

5-17-2015 Another split attempt and adding a deep super

Apparently the previous attempt to split the hive didn't take.... and the silver top hive was busting at the seams (and even had some queen cells... see above pictures).  So, I took the frames with queen cells and put it in the weak queenless hive in the hopes to 1 - Prevent a swarm from the strong hive and 2- Get the weak hive to produce a queen and become stronger.

Also, I added a second deep super to the strong hive just to make sure there was plenty of room to help prevent a swarm.

We'll take a look in  a few weeks to see how things are going.

4-11-2015 Spring Split

The week prior (April 4) the hives were checked for the first time this year and it looked like something bad happened to one of the hives.  There was a pile of dead bees at the bottom of the hive and many dead bees burrowed into the comb.  It looks like these bees maybe froze to death over the very cold winter we had.

Fortunately, the hive with the silver lid still had plenty of bees and the queen was laying with two frames full of brood... So, in order to experiment with trying to get a second hive going ..and try to prevent a swarm, I decided to split the hive.

I took one of the full frames of brood (making sure there were some very young eggs in the frames and ensuring the queen in the original hive was NOT on the frame) I swapped the frame for a frame of honey in the empty hive.  I also swapped a couple other frames as well...  This actually gave the old hive a few frames of honey to get them really cranking.

We'll see in a couple weeks how this turns out.

On another note, I'm seriously thinking about getting a flow hive setup.