The spring has been a favourable one for the bees, and after an inspection a week ago, things were looking very promising. Sarah, after the merge had really filled out, so I added supers, which were just starting to be drawn out this week. However, she also had a wet queen cell, which was earlier than I expected! Having inspected Tess and found her not very far behind, I decided to take advantage of the situation, and try to bring on some nucs.
I took 2 nuc boxes, taking 5 frames from each colony (3 brood, 1 eggs, 1 stores), shook in as many bees as I could, and placed these on new sites. The flying bees will return to the original colony, but the nurse bees will stay behind, raise the brood, and hopefully also queen cells.
There was only one complication - I couldn’t find the queen in Tess. Despite writing down that she was unmarked, I somehow forgot this fact, and discovered today that with a very busy colony with a lot of running bees I just couldn’t find her.
I went ahead with the split anyway, and will check back in a few days time. Either the original hive or the colony will have queen cells in it - meaning the queen is in the other box. I can then spend time finding and marking her.
Hopefully this increase in numbers will allow us to pass on bees to new beginners from the EMBA course which will be running very soon.
