A couple of days ago, a new wannabee (maybe) asked to ride with me to see if she wanted to keep bees. I asked her to come by this morning and we would put on some supers. At the time I thought I would have the medium supers that I would have extracted ready to go back on the hives so I could pull the shallow supers back off. As it was, I did not.

So I decided to restock the observation hive and get a queen in there. When we got ready, the young lady in my bee suit and me in my heavy shirt, we got the observation hive (OBH) down from it’s perch on top of the freezer-turned into a honey heater. Right off the bat, I saw a beautiful queen bee in the hive just alaying eggs as fast as she could. I don’t know how she ended up in the observation hive — I can only speculate.

I put the OBH back on the honey heater and we left to make a split at an apiary about 30 miles away. The hive that was strong the last time I saw it had bees out on the porch and up the wall to the 2nd story. Amanda took pictures of that awesome sight, to her, as I got the smoker and started smoking everywhere. I found drone cells in the first and second supers. Not a good sign. However, when I got into the brood box, I found 5 frames of worker brood. There were about 5 queen cells for supersedure and several swarm cells that were capped. There were several queen cells in the two supers also. Along with the closed queen cells, there were, in the three boxes, about 6-8 cells that had been torn open from the sides. Could have been remains of earlier supersedure cells and/or swarm cells.

At this point, I really didn’t care. I went ahead and split the bees, hoping that either would have enough queen cells to make a queen if either split did not have one. There were easily 80,000 to 100,000 bees in the colony. I could not find the queen, but I only looked one time as the sky was getting ready to dump some rain. I quickly made the split, closed everything up, and loaded the new split onto the truck.

We made the transfer to another apiary about 60 miles away. An apiary that I had bees in, but didn’t at the time. After that, we stopped to eat lunch and talk.

After returning home, and she left, I still don’t know if she wants to be a beekeeper, however, she did volunteer to help me clean boxes and frames. That in itself is promising. I’ll let you know about that later.

In the meantime, sharpen your hive tool and get some dry smoker material in a bag just in case the rains come. It is very hard to start wet material.