The long finger looking cell in the middle of the frame is a queen cell.

In our latest hive inspection we found that Hive 1 has a fully formed queen cell. The queen that came with the nuc that went into hive 1, seemed to come with a bad leg. These two conditions will allow us to create a split. To do that I will take the original queen and put her in a nuc box (that’s just a smaller box that holds 5 frames, like the ones we picked our nucs up in). We’ll shake in some bees from some of the frames on hive 1 and put the nuc box over in the corner of the yard. That’s what’s called a walk away split. In hive 1, we’ll let the queen cell hatch and get mated. The queen cell is larger than the normal larvae cell because the queen is raised completely on royal jelly. The other bees are given royal jelly only for the first 3 days.

During our inspection, we looked for a few frames that have eggs, brood and larvae to install in the nuc box for our split. We are also needing to grab some of the honey so the split has resources.

Because we are taking resources from hive 1, we’ll need to give them some 2:1 syrup (2 parts sugar to 1 part water), to help feed them. If a hive lacks enough resources to survive, it’s only a matter of days before the colony cannot survive.

After a bit of time, if everything looks good and the queens are both accepted,, we can comfortably say that we have a split and 4 hives. If the new queen has issues in hive 1, we can still reintroduce the original queen to the hive.

Chris, the boxing beekeeper

This first hive maintenance reveals a queen cell and how busy our bees have been already!