I split a hive on May 18 taking six frames and some swarm cells and leaving some Q cells in the main hive. I found and marked the split's queen on June 10 but the main hive still has no evidence of a laying queen. I have dutifully added a frame of eggs from a nuc each week for the last two weeks and the bees dutifully cap all the worker brood in these frames, not making any queen cells of them. Is this unusually long and would you be at all concerned at this point?
What did you do with the queen from the orignal hive? It sounds to me as if the hive had already swarmed prior to your making the split, or it swarmed shortly there after and the new queen failed to survive the mating flights or, as occasiionally happens, both fighting queens lost, leaving the hive queenless. The 3rd senario is that the queen hasn't started laying yet as weather and other conditions can delay the mating flights, which in turn can affect how soon a new queen starts laying.
If you did not see evidence of laying workers yet, chances are the hive is still queen right. Give it another 10-14 days. Moving a frame of brood (with eggs) from the hive that has a functioning queen could serve to jump start the queen in the original hive.
I would have made 2 nucs from those six frames thereby increasing the chances of coming out of the split with 2, and maybe 3 functioning queens.
When splitting a hive with queen cells it is paramount to move the queen out as if she swarmed, that's split 1, it goes to a new location in the bee yard. Then do another split, depending on quantity of queen cells, dividing the queen cells between the split and the original hive.
You now have a "swarm" containing the original queen, and 2 spllits with queen cells. If for some reason either split fails to produce a functioning queen then that split can be recombined with the other.
Topic: Count down to the queen (Read 1059 times)