Yesterday I examined a couple of beehives belonging to a friend here in Japan. They are Apis mellifera (European Honey Bees). He tried to split them earlier to increase the number of his hives but wasn’t sure how they were doing and wanted me to take a look at them with him.
I got there while he was out helping some people move, so had a chance to look things over slowly and carefully by myself first. One hive looked like it had plenty of bees and was doing fine when I looked at it from the top of the frames after removing the cover, so I replaced that cover and went to look at the other hive. The second hive had few bees and not much foraging activity, so I took the frames out one by one and carefully examined each one. I could find no queen, no eggs, and no queen cells–only a small amount of drone brood, so I figured it was queenless. I then returned to the other hive and went through the frames in it one by one as well. There was a small amount of brood and I found a queen, but I could find no eggs, even though there was an active queen. Maybe there were eggs but I just could not see them (cloudy day). It looked like there was quite a bit of dead drone brood that had not successfully emerged and that the bees had not cleaned out and that was a bad sign to me. I replaced the cover and waited for my friend to return home.
When he arrived, we went back and I explained what I had found. As I was looking at the hives previously, two thoughts had occurred to me. One was that when one makes a split, he or she has to be certain that there are some new eggs in the worker brood area in order for the split to make a new queen. I am not sure whether he did that or not since he is a new inexperienced beekeeper. Secondly, the dimensions of the hive equipment are very important so that the combs will be spaced properly in order for the bees to keep the brood warm and build an orderly nest. His equipment is all home made (including the frames) so I am not sure whether or not he really understood the concept and importance of “beespace” when he built his equipment. He is a carpenter by profession. I am sure that when he started out earlier that I had explained those things to him, but I am not sure how well he followed those concepts when he actually made the components.
We looked again at the hive where I had found the queen bee, and he showed me some queen cells on a different frame that was away from the frame where I had seen the queen. I had not noticed them before, or at least if I had, they had appeared to be empty to me. He showed me one queen cell that the workers were chewing a hole in the side of and pointed out that the queen bee inside that cell was alive and moving but could not get out of the cell yet. We decided to take that frame and put it in the queenless hive, hoping that the bees in the other hive would accept her and survive. I suggested that he not disturb his bees for a while and hopefully they might build up and survive as two queenright hives. Neither hive had looked as healthy as I had hoped they would, so I will check them again in a couple of weeks to see if they look like they have improved. It was disappointing to see that they looked so poorly.