I drove out to Frederick, MD this morning to pick up a new queen from H. T. Krantz. He doesn’t mark the queens that he sells, so I guess I’ll have to learn how to do that later this summer. Queens come in little wooden boxes with one hole blocked by fondant (cake icing?)
The plan was to pinch (kill) the original queen and put the new queen (in the wooden cage) into the hive for the bees to get used to her.That was the plan until I opened up the hive to find the old queen. Somehow she must have figured out that her job was on the line because the hive was in way better shape than it was during last week’s inspection. The bees had built out wax on all but two of the frames, and the frames with larvae/capped brood had 50 – 70 percent coverage.
Most of the split frames (partial foundation) had been built out with drone comb on the open sections and worker comb on the foundation sections. This was exactly what I was hoping that they would do. Suddenly I was looking at a hive that was performing quite well. I changed my mind about pinching the queen and decided to do a ‘split’ instead.
The Tardis Hive
I pulled two frames of mostly capped brood and one with nectar/pollen along with one of my partial foundation frames and put them in a new hive, along with the new queen from Krantz.
I painted this one last winter, but didn’t plan to use it unless I caught a swarm or came across some unexpected source of bees. The split is only using the bottom box right now, but I will add the other boxes as the hive grows.
So now I have two hives. The original “Bees Rules” hive with the original queen from Kevin and a split that I made with the new queen from Krants. I think I still need to replace the queen from Kevin this year, but for now she is doing a great job.