Guilfordbeekeepers.org

I came home to find a large number of bees on the front of one of my hives--typical of a swarm which returns because the queen did not go with it. I saw unusual activity in front of another hive and found the marked queen from the swarming hive. I put her in a queen clip and put frames and a nuc right up against the swarming hive. Then I gave Wally a call. No more than a medium frame of the bees on the front of the hive walked into the nuc, so Wally suggested I take about 3 brood frames-WITHOUT queen cells and move them into a hive with the queen and the bees still with her. I did that and I shook some more bees into that hive. I will probably release the queen from the clip tomorrow. The original hive had a lot of bees and a lot of queen cells, so I took a frame with 2 capped queen cells and brood, 2 more brood frames, added 2 partial honey frames from my freezer, and shook a few more bees into the nuc.

I'm not sure if this qualifies as a swarm or a self-help split on the bees part.

So, if I'm reading right, you turned 1 hive into 3?

If queens get mated, that's what it will work out to be.

The fun continues. The nuc I made from this hive has a laying queen and the original queen moved to a new 10 frame medium has resumed her prolific laying. The original hive has made 2 more swarm attempts, the last being yesterday morning. Each time, the bees returned to the hive.

This morning, I went in the hive to see what was going on. There were many queen cells, some near emerging and some showing signs of emerged queens. I pulled a brood frame and heard piping. I saw the virgin queen walking around, so I put her and that frame in a nuc along with 2 more frames of bees, nectar and pollen. I shook more bees into that nuc and closed it up.

I pulled another frame and saw a queen cell with an open end and a bee kept poking its head out. I started to look to the side of the cell to see if it had been opened from the side when the queen in the cell started piping. I helped her out. She flew about a foot and a half in the air and landed back on the frame. I got another nuc box and repeated the steps with the first one. I replaced the removed frames with partially drawn and undrawn ones and closed up the original hive. Since then, I have found 4 dead virgin queens on the driveway pad in front of the hives. I imagine major queen battles are taking place in the original hive

If these 2 nuc queens get mated, that will make 5 hives from this one hive that my notes show as being "weak" about a month and a half ago.