Hive split and fingers crossed

Having consulted with the nice people at Ealing Beekeepers Association yesterday (cheers Andy!), I decided to go through with splitting the hive and creating another colony as I had originally planned. The view, given the recent weather, the spotting of eggs on Thursday and so on, was that the old queen was likely still in the hive and the removal of the remaining queen cell (actually I think there may be more than one left on that frame) and a bunch of bees might do the trick. If the old queen was NOT there then the workers will be able to create an emergency queen cell, and in any event I have time to requeen if they do not or if a resultant queen is not a good one. As I looked through the hive I DID spot some more eggs, indicating that the old queen probably is/was in the hive. Interestingly, though, these eggs were not in a neatly laid pattern but instead laid sporadically across the cells of the frame on which I spotted them. Hhhmmmm.....

The operation was fairly simple. Since I had an old national brood box (half full of honey) on the hive above the queen excluder I just moved the frame with the queen cells and brood into this box and put in an additional frame of brood in from my other hive. I made this up as a stack (bottom to top): crown board, super, brood box, crown board. I then wrapped it with a cross of strong straps. The crown boards kept the stack sandwiched without a heavy roof to contend with, and both have their feeder holes covered with plastic mesh which I pin down (I do this to all my crown boards). I used the super in the stack since the queen cell was protruding below its frame in the brood box and I wanted to make sure it did not get bashed. I threw the lot in the back of my car, sprayed it with water to keep it cool and drove to my mother-in-law's stunning garden just outside London in Gerrards Cross (about 15 miles from the original site). The site is perfect: hidden on a low flat roof with easy exterior access, discrete, south facing, sheltered from behind with a huge hedge and in a very garden-rich area. Together with a stand, varroa mesh floor, roof and entrance reducer it looks beautiful in place. Pictures coming soon. I've named the new hive Cleopatra. The colony has a decent store of honey, two frames of brood, at least one queen cell (hard to see on that wild comb below the frame in question and there may be three), and really quite a lot of bees too. Moving the bees seemed to have been quite simple. I hope they weren't too traumatised by the experience.

The little apidea mating hive I have in my own garden seems a failure. I opened it this afternoon to find only a few (50?) bees remaining, all rather stuporous with none of the natural comb I had hoped to see being built from the frame tops, despite my having melted starter wax strips in there beforehand. The queen cell I had wired in had been abandoned, and so wasted. Shame. Why the failure? Not enough bees? Inclement weather for the past few days? I don't know. It does seem to me to be quite a big ask to dump a small number of bees in the box and hope the will just get on with even a little comb building whilst in those new surroundings. This tiny group of bees seems to lack any critical mass. I think what I'll do is put the apidea, with the bottom entrance open, above the feeder hole of a crown board in a happy hive and get those bees to build the comb in situ, so that when I put the box into action it's all ready to go. Then I'll try again if and when I feel more confident and I have more queen cells to spare.