[mcooper]

Hello all, I hope summer is proving productive for you. I've pulled 12 gallons of honey off so far with maybe 20 more gallons in supers I need to harvest.

I recently made a split for a queen I needed to place, about 4 weeks ago. I made the split and set it right alongside the mother hive, placing it in a 5 frame nuc. 2 weeks ago I added a second nuc body, the queen was out and laying. As of now the hive doesn't have a great brood pattern, few eggs, and I didn't see the queen (wasn't searching hard). The hive hasn't drawn out any frames either, should I be concerned?

I also made a nuc like this using frames from 2 hives, I dumped extra nurse bees in and set the nuc next to one of the hives. Should I be concerned, if so what should I do?

 

[Beeslave]

When you say "next to" how exactly were they placed? You want to keep the entrances seperated or you will have major drifting to the strong hive where the main flow(flight) of bees are. It's best to place the new hive/nuc entrance facing a different direction. As long as you shake in plenty of bees and give them honey and pollen in frames to start they should be ok. When you start a nuc or hive and leave it in the original yard the older field bees go back to the original hives and there is only young bees left in the hive. Then there is no foragers for a while until the nurse bees age.

 

[mcooper]

The 5 frame I made 2 days ago I set near other hives (a foot from one, but I flipped it around to face the opposite direction). The now 10 frame nuc (has lots of honey BTW, I had placed a frame of capped brood in the top box to entice the bees to move on up, and it's been filled with honey except for the few still caps worker cells. This nuc I'd placed with the telescoping cover touching the parent hive, now it is a foot away. Maybe I should switch positions with the nuc and parent hive to get some foragers, then move the nucs to my other bee yard?

 

[Beeslave]

Did you introduce mated queens or allow them to make their own? Allowing a hive to make their own queen and leaving that hive in a yard of queen right hives will cause loss of bees from splits also. The bees like to go to other queen right colonies.

You could swap it with another hive but if there is no flow or a weak flow you may cause the weak hive to have the queen killed from the foragers of the strong hive. Shaking nurse bees off of frames from a strong colony at the entrance of the weak colony will boost the population with less harm. The older bees that have had orientation flights will fly back to there hive and the young nurse bees will go in the entrance of the weak hive with out much problems.