Today is a somewhat rainy day (light rain) here in Fukuoka. Since it is Saturday and I had time, I visited the western honey bee hives at Teruo Shiki’s house. Teruo san was picking ume (Japanese plums used to make pickled/dried plums–umeboshi) from the tree in his yard. He had lots of ume this year, probably due to all the honey bee hives around it.
After my greetings, the first thing I did was to open and look at the bees in every hive (there are 4 of them) to see the conditions. The smallest nucleus hive (with 4 frames) is doing fine but although healthy and active, the colony is very small yet. That is my original “shook swarm” hive. The hive it came out of has a new queen and the brood pattern is good in it, although I did not see the new queen. Teruo told me that he has seen it.
The next one I checked was the one I shook and split most recently, not knowing which part of the split had the queen in it, I added one frame with fresh eggs on it from the original hive into the shook part so they could raise a queen if the queen happened to be in the other part. I pulled that frame out to look at it and found no queen cells, so I deduce that the old queen is in this hive. I am quite sure that is the case, because when I then opened the original hive (which at the time of splitting had one capped queen cell in it), that hive now had about 10 or more capped queen cells in it. That is pretty strong evidence that the queen is in the other hive.
I decided to combine the two hives that I had split originally back into one, so I wired foundation into 6 more frames and used them to fill out a super to which I added the nucleus colony from the 4 frame nucleus hive, and then put that super on top of the original hive from which it was split. There are a couple or several possible outcomes to this manipulation. First is that “the bees will decide” which queen they want to keep. Another is that the mother and daughter queen may both stay in the hive together, cooperating and both laying eggs until the original mother is superceded by her daughter. I suppose there is also the possiblility of a swarm issuing from the hive, but I think that is less likely since it now has two actively laying queens (at least as of the time I combined them. It is possible that with the two queen scenario, the hive population could “explode” and I will have to make sure I add enough empty space to it so they can store a lot of honey. That is my hope for it, but I will check it in a week to see how it looks. I have heard from experienced beekeepers (Dee Lusby) that many old time beekeepers performed this manipulation for this purpose and often it was very successful. Regardless, my hope is that I will end up with one large healthy hive from these two that were about to swarm before I split them.
My plan for this hive is to move it into my largest equipment and for it to become the biggest and most productive hive. The original part of the hive is a homemade hive body with non-standard frames that are spaced incorrectly, I plan to move that equipment out completely in the end. Ultimately I will put it above a queen excluder until all the brood emerges and the bees then fill it with honey, then harvest the honey and remove it completely. In the meantime I will need to prepare more equipment (supers and frames) to accomodate the growing colony. One more note on this one: I noticed one or two queen cells in the old part of the hive, even though it has a new queen in it, so I moved an empty comb into the middle of the brood nest to give her more room to lay in. These bees may be thinking about swarming again. The old queen is in the super on top with her nucleus colony right now, surrounded by 6 empty frames with 4.9 foundation. I will check it again in a week if the weather is good and decide what to do and when to do it. Before knowing what I do now about possibilities, I would probably have removed and killed one of the queens myself, but I decided to let the bees do what they think is best instead. We shall see what happens.