Splitting Hive 1 To Make The Hive 4 - (May 25)

Today I split Hive 1 (Chris's hive).  These bees are hard workers, did not try to swarm in the spring and the queen is a really good layer.  They also produced a good amount of honey in short amount of time in 2012.  This is the Buckfast queen I purchased in 2011.  I want to carry on these characteristics so will split the hive.

I found 5 frames of young eggs, 3 frames of food / pollen / capped brood and 2 frames of capped honey.  I removed all bees from these frames and put the frames in the 4^th hive body and put empty frames in the #1 hive.  I placed a queen excluder on top of the #1 hive and the #4 hive on top of the queen excluder.  The idea is that all of the nurse bees will return to the frames they were originally on within an hour or so.  This also ensures the Queen bee will stay in hive #1.

After an hour and a half I removed the Hive 4 (now full of nurse bees) and put it on the other hive stand with a bucket feeder and closed everything up.

The nurse bees will quickly figure out they are now queenless and will start to make a new queen, hence carrying on the genes to the new colony.  If things go well, I look for a new Buckfast queen to emerge in 12 days.  This will be around June 6, 2012.  From there she will go on a mating flight in 18 days and will hopefully be laying in 28 days.  This will be around June 11-12, 2012.  She should be laying around June 24, 2012.

FINGERS CROSSED!!!  If this works, we will have hive #4 which I will heavily feed the rest of the year to prepare them for winter.

Here is the Queen calendar based on when I made this split:

Day #	DOW	Date	Task/Status
1	Tuesday	22-May	The egg is laid by the queen mother.
2	Wednesday	23-May
3	Thursday	24-May
4	Friday	25-May	Insert into a queenless cell builder colony.
5	Saturday	26-May
6	Sunday	27-May	Check your Hive.  The bees should have started to to draw out the cells and feed the larvae with royal jelly. If not, re-graft.
7	Monday	28-May
8	Tuesday	29-May
9	Wednesday	30-May	Queen cells are capped
10	Thursday	31-May	Sensitive developmental phase - do not move cells and be very gentle when opening the hive.
11	Friday	1-Jun
12	Saturday	2-Jun
13	Sunday	3-Jun
14	Monday	4-Jun
15	Tuesday	5-Jun
16	Wednesday	6-Jun	Queens hatch
17	Thursday	7-Jun
18	Friday	8-Jun	Discard any unhatched cells
19	Saturday	9-Jun
20	Sunday	10-Jun
21	Monday	11-Jun	Mating Flights
22	Tuesday	12-Jun
23	Wednesday	13-Jun
24	Thursday	14-Jun
25	Friday	15-Jun
26	Saturday	16-Jun
27	Sunday	17-Jun
28	Monday	18-Jun
29	Tuesday	19-Jun
30	Wednesday	20-Jun
31	Thursday	21-Jun
32	Friday	22-Jun
33	Saturday	23-Jun
34	Sunday	24-Jun	Check Hive for eggs.
35	Monday	25-Jun
36	Tuesday	26-Jun
37	Wednesday	27-Jun
38	Thursday	28-Jun
39	Friday	29-Jun	Check Hive for larvae.
40	Saturday	30-Jun	Larvae found?  If so, the queen is ready!
41	Sunday	1-Jul	Re-queen if no eggs are present.