Another Experiment

My weak hive has set several capped queen cells to replace the failing queen.  My hope it that these new queens will be as prolific as the older one was earlier in her life.  We should have enough drones from our original strong hive to provide the new queen some consistent and strong genetics.  These are Carniolan bees.

So I have two frames from these weak hives each with their own capped queencell.  I am going to further split this hive with following procedure:

• Take one frame with the brood and queen cell, sweep off all the bees, and put it in an isolated nuc.
• Take two frames of bees from our strong hive and include in the nuc.
• Add pollen patties and feeder to strengthen this tiny colony while the brood hatches.
• Watch the hive for the queen to hatch, then breed.
• Hopefully this hive then produces new brood to grow to a healthy size.

I'm looking forward to see how this works!  I could get two healthy carni hives out of this failing hive, plus the split I did with the new queen last week.  A good investment I'd say if it works.  My new 4-frame nuc boxes that I built will come in handy for this effort.  I'm going to need to slow down on these little experiments now that the weather is getting colder.  These colonies will need to build up to survive winter.