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This first year has been crazy ... I started with 1 hive from an older couple that have kept bees for 35 years to pollinate their apple orchard.
The bees really wanted to swarm so I've made 4 splits from the original hive: 2 of the splits are still going strong, 1 lost the queen and had a worker laying so it got shook out in front of the others, 1 had AFB and got burned.
Once the split with AFB was found I built all new equipment and shook the remainer of the hives onto new equipment and burned all of the old equipment I inherited from the orchard (watching over 20 mediums and 17 deeps with frames plus bottom boards and misc equipment be destroyed like that was heart breaking).
I've also caught 3 swarms: of which 1 started capping queen cells (couldn't find the queen) so I combined it with one of my original splits, 1 has brood in 3 mediums and a super of honey and another is filling out the second 8 frame medium pretty quickly.
Note: Only my first swarm is on 10 frame currently, I have the other 4 hives on 8 frame mediums.
The bees really wanted to swarm so I've made 4 splits from the original hive: 2 of the splits are still going strong, 1 lost the queen and had a worker laying so it got shook out in front of the others, 1 had AFB and got burned.
Once the split with AFB was found I built all new equipment and shook the remainer of the hives onto new equipment and burned all of the old equipment I inherited from the orchard (watching over 20 mediums and 17 deeps with frames plus bottom boards and misc equipment be destroyed like that was heart breaking).
I've also caught 3 swarms: of which 1 started capping queen cells (couldn't find the queen) so I combined it with one of my original splits, 1 has brood in 3 mediums and a super of honey and another is filling out the second 8 frame medium pretty quickly.
Note: Only my first swarm is on 10 frame currently, I have the other 4 hives on 8 frame mediums.