I took off time from work to make 2 or 4 nucs and then go pick up 2 queens to install in them (if I were to make 4 it would be with 2 queen cells from Red which had swarmed).
Well that was the plan. It didn’t end up happening.
Red: The swarm cells were all open so the queens had slugged it out and the new queen would be getting ready to fire things up. I removed several frames of honey in preparation of making nucs, but didn’t want to take any of the brood since I was worried that I might accidentally grab the queen.
Blue: So I decided to get the brood I needed to make the nucs from Blue instead. Blue seemed more aggressive than other times I had visited and there was very little brood inside. While moving one frame that had some brood in it I noticed the queen. I suspect that what was going on was that Blue had been one of the hives that had swarmed earlier and that this was a new queen just getting going. I made a snap decision to, since I had her, to use Blue’s queen to make a nuc, and then combine the Swarm hive with the remaining bees. This would give me one nuc and one stronger hive rather than two so-so hives. It might have made more sense to use the Swarm queen for the nuc, but I had Blue’s queen in my hand and was already all set to drop that frame into a nuc.
Blue had also been rather depopulated by the swarm, so it had many empty frames inside. I removed enough in order to collapse it down to just one box. And other frames not so empty were used to make the nuc. This would then make it easier to combine as I would be adding one more brood box from the swarm bringing me back to 2 boxes. As a side benefit, the Swarm hive was already in a blue brood box so I would not have to swap frames around to keep my color coding.
I put the blue brood box from Swarm on top of the remaining brood box of Blue with a layer of newspaper in between. By the time the bees chew their way through the newspaper they will have equilibrated their scents of will feel like one hive and not two hives at war with each other. I later noticed the foragers from Swarm were loitering around the old site of Swarm, so I placed a an empty brood box there (I think with a few frames inside it) to give them some place to go to and thus I could collect them later. They crawled right in.
Dark Green (Holly): I wanted to draw from Holly in order to make the other nucs. But when I opened it I found that it was also depopulated and apparently also had a few emergency queen cells, several open and two closed). These are queen cells that instead of hanging from the bottom of a frame (like a warm cell) or built down in the middle of a frame (like a supercedure cell), the queen cell had been a regular worker cell that had been expanded by extending the cell out and then downward. So something had happened to the previous queen and this hive had scrambled to come up with a queen. I decided to remove the remaining closed cells so that there would be no fighting or even another swarm. I popped of the cap of one and out came the queen who then crawled around. At that point I didn’t have the heart to smush her so I made a nuc using her though I think it was done with not that many bees.
I then called my Queen supplier to cancel my order. I felt a little bad about that as I had earlier been calling and leaving messages to arrange a pick up. I really should had known that I did not have the materials to make any nucs but I had not taken the time in earlier visits. This observation helped to spur me to make the decision to ramp down the number of hives to something more manageable. Perhaps 3 hives in each yard.
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