You can’t spell beekeeping without “hope”

Last month, I created two new split hives. A split, for those unfamiliar with such things, is when you take a frame or frames of brood and bees from an existing, strong hive, and put them in a new hive, either with a new queen (which is what I did) or by taking our brood that contains eggs that were recently laid so the bees will create an emergency queen for themselves.

I also had a third hive I had split previously, without a queen, which was going nowhere, but which had bees in it. So I also added a queen to that hive as well. About a week ago, I opened this hive to find it completely empty of bees: a failed split.

Today I visited the bees to feed them, only to find one of the attempted split hives completely empty: abandoned, including a queen with clipped wings who would be unable to fly. I think this one is on me. Last week, I had removed some frames that wax moths had gotten into but that I had cleared, because the bees were not drawing any comb on them. This change may have thrown a wrench into things and either pissed them off that they drifted to the other hives or they just left, in which case they’re all dead by now, having no queen. So, I’ve ordered another queen, and this time will take two frames of brood from the very large hive, and beyond those two frames pulled from the other hive, the other frames will be brand new. Hopefully that will allow them to build up as we move into winter. If it works, I’ll do the same with the original split attempt. Overall, it’s disappointing this one left. However, the second split I did at the same time as this one is still working itself up: I found the queen, the workers are drawing comb, and I think they will survive. Or I hope. Beekeeping is, at its most basic, a lot about hope.

In other news, the three new package hives seem to be doing fine, and one of them was really aggressive and pissy when I opened it to have a quick peek inside – it was still rather early and slightly foggy, so the foragers were not all out foraging. Full bee suit FTW!

Later this week, I’ll go into the supers on the really string hive, and the second hive that is making a fairly nice go of things, and see if there is more honey to pull. But I’ll bring the smoker when I do, to keep them a bit more sedate than they were today.