Queen Chronicles Part 4

I’m truly blessed to be able to reach out to people for help. And for the most part, a lot of people want to help! And I’m grateful because as a new beekeeper there are things that no book or YouTube video will prepare me for. So I sent out the “Bee Signal” and asked for help.

It appears everybody wanted to side with the hubs this go around. It was strongly suggested that we get in and split the hive. Thankfully I was able to get more help because really, where do I begin here? So with some appreciated guidance we dove back in.

What does a split entail? It’s just as it seems. We needed to go back in and split the hive in two. You take the old queen and move her to a new home. With her you need to make sure you have your frames of stores (honey, pollen and nectar), some brood frames and nurse bees. With most instances (or so I’ve read and watched) you can take all the stores from one hive. Problem there is this is still a really weak hive. Thankfully we had three other hives to choose from to help the situation.

I had purchased a Nuc (small 5 frame box) that is designed for this or trapping or whatever you need it for, and just had it sitting idly by waiting to be needed. Well now we needed it! So I set that up and got it ready to start moving over frames. First up was a feeder frame full of delicious goodness for them. With all the other hives I just fed sugar water (just like for hummingbirds just a different ratio) but for these girls I purchased some professional feed to help them best I could.

Next we began going through Hive 4 in search for the queen. Once we had her safely moved over to the Nuc and I moved a full frame of honey and pollen over. Next we had to get into another hive (we chose Hive 2) and start looking for frames of brood. Thankfully Hive 2 is our second most powerful hive and she had ample brood for us to grab. We put one brood frame into the Nuc and one into Hive 4 and began tidying back up.

I’ve now got 2 hives that I need to keep a very close eye on. And so we wait….again. In the meantime, look how cute!