Nucleus Hives : The beginning

My swarm hive from last year is doing very well and it looks like they are trying to supersede the queen. I want to keep these genetics so I have decided to try to make 2 nucleus hives from her. I do not know how old she is but I figure she is at least 2 years old. The nature of swarming is that the old queen leaves with half of the bees and bees rarely swarm on their first year. To make 2 nucleus hives from her I figured out which frame she was on and set that aside. I then took 2 frames of very young eggs and some capped brood and pollen frames with bees still covering the frames and placed them in my 5 frame nucleus box. I put empty frames to fill in the rest of the space. I did the same thing with the other box but took 3 frames this time. I placed the queen back in the original parent colony and replaced the frames that I took with drawn out comb. I then took these nucleus boxes and brought them to my other bee yard (my house). I have 2 full colonies here and they will have enough drones to breed with the queens that these nucleus hives produce. These nucleus hives will detect that they do not have a queen and they will start feeding some young larvae some royal jelly and they will raise emergency queen cells. These queens will emerge in 13 days. The first queen out will kill all of her rivals by tearing apart their cells and stinging them to death.

 Here is what the nucleus hives look like. I put some blocks in front to reduce the entrance so that my strong colonies do not rob them out. 

The bees were moved at the end of the day and therefore took new flights the next nice day and re-orientated themselves with their new surroundings.

They quickly can find pollen and honey and a good source of water. I was happy to see a lot of different colored pollen on the bees; this indicates that there are some good sources out there and that the bees have a lot of resources. I will check the hives soon to see that they indeed have started some emergency queen cells. This is the first time I have ever done this; so I am excited to see how it turns out!

This happened May 10th, 2010. I am running behind on my blog posts!