We recently conducted a hive inspection looking for queen cells in one of our hives. We did this for a couple of reasons. One reason was the population of this colony was quickly growing and we wanted to try and prevent the hive from swarming. Since the presence of queen cells, especially capped ones, can be an indicator of potential swarming. While we were hoping to prevent a swarm, we really were hoping to find a few queen cells to use to make a “split” of the hive.
This particular colony is very mellow and easy to work with. So far to work with this hive has required very little smoke or we have been very successful using only a 1:1 sugar syrup. While there are no guarantees, we are hoping that we can replicate the characteristics of the current with through a split into two hives. Time will tell and hopefully during our next inspection we will find a couple of queen cells and give it a shot at a split.
We will report back on that project in the future. The video above is a short experiment in producing videos for this site. More and much improved videos to come.
