Backyard Apiary

First Split

May 25th, 2009

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My wife and I went through Hegemone and Antheia for the first time on the 24th. We started with Antheia and then went through Hegemone.

Antheia Bee Log Entry

Inspection. 4 frames of eggs, larvae and brood. Unmarked queen found. Light, golden body. Superceded? Found an emerged queen cell, a killed queen cell and a capped queen cell. Lots of capped honey on the edge frames. Queen is laying a good pattern. Foundationless frames drawn out straight with a good grouping of drone cells. Added super and pulled up a brood frame to encourage queen to lay in both boxes.

Hegemone Bee Log Entry

No eggs, larvae, brood, drone cells or queen. Lots of straight drawn comb with lots of capped honey. Hive appeared to be strong since the workers have no brood to tend.

We were both a bit panicked about Hegemone not having a queen and it didn’t help that it was a holiday weekend. We followed the advise given to every new beekeeper, “you’re going to want to, but don’t go in to the hive for 3-4 weeks.” Had we gone in sooner, we could have noticed the pending crash much sooner and taken corrective action. It’s a good thing we went through Antheia first. Otherwise it would not have been apparrent how dire the situation was in Hegemone.

We started to call around to get in touch with mentors from the WCBA and see if we could find a place selling queens. I managed to reach a WCBA mentor and was given a few options on how to proceed. Get a replacement queen, use a queen cage and introduce Antheia’s queen in to Hegemone, combine the hives, or do nothing and see what happens. I also posted to beemaster.com to solicit advice (post: “Hive is going to crash“).

We chose to wait until the 25th to speak with the Busy Bee queen breeder. My wife spoke with Betsy, the Busy Bee queen breeder and she mentioned that the hive could potentially have a virgin queen. The virgin queen could either be off on mating flights or we may have just missed her in the hive since they are more difficult to spot. That would explain the lack of laying worker. I plan to get Will Hicks, the state bee inspector to come out in the next few days to help me look for her. If he determines that there is no queen, Betsy will put me to the head of the line for a replacement queen.

I was a bit less panicked about Hegemone, so I decided to split Antheia to form Chloris. I like the greek goddess naming convention. Chloris was the goddess of flowers. I took the frame with the queen cell (had lots of capped brood), a frame with capped honey with lots of empty space in the center for laying and a third frame which the bees were almost done building up comb. The third frame was mostly to add more bees to the split. Chloris replaces Antheia as the hive at the end, so I’m expecting some bees to drift in to it.

I built the nuc and top from scraps left over from when I built 10 medium boxes. I picked up the bottom board and entrance feeder from Busy Bee today. It’s not pretty or exceptionally sturdy, but the price was low and it only took me about 10 minutes to put it all together with hand tools and my pneumatic staple gun.