Last week I challenged myself to make an observation hive with only scraps that the previous homeowners left at the house. They had left two glass panes and some wood scraps that I was able to make into a fairly nice looking observation hive. So then I inspected the hive I was going to split to make sure it had plenty of fresh eggs and brood and that there were drones active. I found all those so I proceeded to move several frames to the observation hive and a replace them with empty frames.
Things were going well until I got to the last frame in the hive and still could not find the queen. I prayed that she would stick out somehow and then went back through the hives. Right before giving up, I looked over at the lid that I had propped up on the side of the hive and saw a single bee on it. It was the queen. So I made the transfer and everything seemed good, but I decided two days later that there was not enough brood and bees in the observation hive to be very successful so I tried to quickly grab a couple extra frames from the hive and put them into the observation hive.
What I found crazy is that in just two days, the bees had almost completely filled out the empty frames I had put in there with white wax. I had no idea they could be that fast at working!