Micro Split Update:

Micro Split Update:

The experiment was to make micro walkaway splits, consisting of one frame open brood, one frame honey, one empty frame, and a shake or two of bees. Then move the nucs to a new location for a few days (or in this case until the queens made mating flights). Then move them back to the home yard for monitoring and working.

I have done the majority of moving the nucs from queen castles to 5-frame nucs now. They are in the stage of nuc rearing where the hive is laid full of brood and just before the brood begins to emerge and the worker population is at a low before they begin to be replaced.

Here are my results:
I split two hives into 15 nucs (plus the original hives). One nuc ended up with the queen from Hive B, which was my favored in terms of survival. I found the queen in Hive A, so assured she remained home.

Two or more of the emerging queens swarmed, forming a swarm with multiple queens. I hived the swarm, which is queenright, and caught one of the queens and placed her back in one of the nucs that appeared queenless, from the castle that issued the swarm, and it is now fine. One of the nucs was noted to be queenless yesterday and had developed laying workers, it was merged with a queenright nuc. Another nuc appeared to be queenless and was divided between two other nucs.

The medium nucs seem to have done well, filling up with brood very quickly, though perhaps suffering from low worker population.

The deep nucs largely ended up filled with brood and honey. That third frame of empty comb is important. And in fact, I would say these colonies perhaps need even less honey, I would venture half a frame or less. If you are keeping them in the same yard and they lose their field force back to the home hive, it is not as big a deal because they will use more, but they need that flex space to grow into when the new queen begins laying. One deep nuc appears to be well behind the curve, having open brood, no capped brood, and low on workers.

Swarming seems to be an issue, though probably a limited issue. I'm not sure yet how to remedy this, it may just be part of the process, capture any swarms issued and retrieve as many virgin queens as you can to put back into the nucs or make new nucs. Perhaps reduce the number of extra bees placed in the nucs at creation. Perhaps eliminate excessive numbers of queen cells made. Only one queen castle seems to have done this, so it may not be a significant issue, the sample size is still small.

So, overall numbers, 15 nucs made, 14 queenright nucs remaining, from two mother hives, 9 from one, 6 from the other. Mother Hive B also appears to be queenright having requeened itself successfully, so I'm counting that.

It's really not necessary to find the queen as long as you check the nucs soon after and see where the queen ended up, just make sure the mother hive retains one frame containing open brood. Interestingly, the queen did not build up enough to swarm even though she filled a three frame medium nuc to the gills. I found her before she had a chance.

This method is extremely similar to my queenright queen rearing method with queen castles as mating nucs, except eliminating the grafting and starter/finisher aspect of it. That makes it easier and more accessible to the new beekeeper.

I think I'm going to amend my recommendations for new beekeepers to start by building 5-10 swarm traps, convertible to new hives, and building or buying at least one queen castle. Queen castles have been totally reinforced in my mind as extremely helpful for the treatment-free beekeeper seeking to expand quickly. At this point, with my 10 3x3 queen castles, I have raised hundreds of nucs. And since they only come out for a month or so each year, they will last a very long time, indefinitely.

It also gives you the opportunity to take queens to be mated in a certain location if that's what you want to do.

One adustment I'm thinking of making is to make new medium queen castles as double 4-5 frame nucs instead of 3x3. Three medium frames is just really small for a colony. Also, while I have a wealth of deep 5-frame nucs, I have no medium nucs at all, which may hinder the move from 3-frame nuc to 10 frame hive.

Wastefulness of the Natural Way of Queen Production

Here's the most recent photo of the yard.

I've been splitting like mad lately.  At last note, there were 12, now there are 17.  I recieved my four new queens with which I made four new hives.  There have been several near disasters with them, primarily owing to severe robbing problems.  One hive was being robbed in terrific fashion, so bad that I took the four frames of brood and queen and put them in a nuc box with a frame of capped honey and took them away.  The robbers then took after the next hive in the row which seemed to be holding its own.  I removed its feeder and the problem seemed to abate.  A third one, I opened to see if the queen had been released, and sure enough she had, just in time to fly away.  It was about five minutes before I found her balled at the entrance of a nearby hive.  It is yet to be seen if she will survive but I hope so.  If she was injured, she'll be replaced, hopefully at the very least with one of her daughters and not one of the daughters of the donor hives with which this hive was made.

Lessons learned:  Don't feed queenless hives.  Keep entrances very small on new splits.  Don't muck about with newly released queens. 

Now, about the title. 

In emergency situations, such as a lost queen or a walkaway split, the hive will feed appropriate aged larvae royal jelly and make a dozen or so into queens.  As Michael Bush rightly states, for all this expenditure of energy and nearly a month of no new eggs, the only result is a single queen as the rest get killed off.  While this is beneficial in a way to the bees in the sense of natural selection, it is very inefficient to us humans who want bees to make lots of bees and be out working making lots of honey.  This year, I have made about seven walk away splits.  That results in about seventy queens, 63 of which reach adulthood only to be immediately killed.  If I could have sold them, it would have netted somewhere in the range of nearly $2000.  What a waste.  Here's the evidence.

These are five dead virgin queens I found near the entrances of hives consisting of walkaway splits or recent supercedures.  This goes to show how inefficient it is to produce queens or new hives in this manner.  It also shows that I could have had the black queen that I've been wanting.

The solution is one of my primary goals for this next year which is to try producing queens in the more standard method of grafting.  With grafting, from a single queenless hive, you could get dozens of virgin queens to be mated in mating nucs to replace ailing queens or to add new stock.  Most rejections happen before the larva gets fed much and if you want to control the natural selection aspect of it, you can by deciding how many queen cells go into a nuc.

Here's what a freshly hatched virgin queen looks like.

In fact, this one is most likely the winner who killed one of the ones above.  You can see her fuzz is still wet, and her exoskeleton still has a milky tone to it.  She was very fresh, there were still untouched queen cells in the hive.  This is the queen that will replace the beat up swarm queen I posted about earlier.

On a final note, I don't think this location can or should support more hives than this.  During this time of year especially, there is little rain and few flowers.  Brooding is limited, and there isn't much storing of honey or building of comb going on.  Robbing can be a problem if a hive is weakened in some way.  It may well be a good time to make splits.  All splits have been successful (except those being fed who also got robbed) in the last month or so.

Unfortunately, due to all this splitting, there won't be any honey this year.  It's going to be enough of a trial to make sure all hives are provisioned for winter.  This could get interesting.  Then again, maybe everything will work out.  Always look on the bright side of life.