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This was probably a bad plan from the start, but it seemed to make sense at the time, right up until a friend offered us a VSH nuc.
What had been our stronger hive evidently had their 2-month-old hygenic queen run out of gas. Her brood started getting spotty and a queen cell showed up. A week later the brood was very spotty and we had about 7 supercedure cells.
We'd been advised that they would probably swarm, so we did a deep inspection looking for the frames with queen cells and for the original queen, planning to split her off into a small hive. Never found her. Plan B, we took two frames with 2 supercedure cells each, some brood, and some stores, and made a small split. We figured we'd see what they could raise on their own, and maybe requeen one or both later if needed.
But then a friend who has been trying to rear queens said he had already built us a nuc with a new VSH queen, whose mother is a bona-fide egg-laying machine. We keep our little apiary in a small bear-resistant cage, and our max capacity is 3 hives. So if we take the nuc, the split we just made is surplus.
So here's the question: should we simply reintegrate those frames into the original hive? The original is not overcrowded and this is only three frames. By now, each hive probably has a virgin queen. We could try to pinch the one from the smaller hive, or should we let them fight it out like Elizabeth and Mary? My guess is that the workers have not been apart long enough (1 week) to make a big fuss over reintroduction.
What had been our stronger hive evidently had their 2-month-old hygenic queen run out of gas. Her brood started getting spotty and a queen cell showed up. A week later the brood was very spotty and we had about 7 supercedure cells.
We'd been advised that they would probably swarm, so we did a deep inspection looking for the frames with queen cells and for the original queen, planning to split her off into a small hive. Never found her. Plan B, we took two frames with 2 supercedure cells each, some brood, and some stores, and made a small split. We figured we'd see what they could raise on their own, and maybe requeen one or both later if needed.
But then a friend who has been trying to rear queens said he had already built us a nuc with a new VSH queen, whose mother is a bona-fide egg-laying machine. We keep our little apiary in a small bear-resistant cage, and our max capacity is 3 hives. So if we take the nuc, the split we just made is surplus.
So here's the question: should we simply reintegrate those frames into the original hive? The original is not overcrowded and this is only three frames. By now, each hive probably has a virgin queen. We could try to pinch the one from the smaller hive, or should we let them fight it out like Elizabeth and Mary? My guess is that the workers have not been apart long enough (1 week) to make a big fuss over reintroduction.