When checking a hive today, we found it ready to swarm. (If it hasn’t already, couldn’t find the original queen, but the hive was overflowing with bees.) The pic is of a virgin queen. When we pulled a frame, the cell split off of the frame. One of our volunteers looked and said their was a bee in it and split open the cell and out she came. She sat on his glove and licked at the honey on it for a little bit and then crawled off onto a frame we put into a split.
One of two virgin queens we found today along with 3 more splits worth of really big, healthy looking queen cells. So, one 4 box high 8 frame hive (all medium boxes) made 5 splits and still have a really healthy hive left.
It was really cloudy and trying to rain, so we couldn’t look real hard for a queen in the remaining hive. If there isn’t one when we go back, we’ll merge one of the splits back into this hive after they’ve mated or merge a nuc we have as a place for a spare queen into the hive.
