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.
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