Anyway, I made a nuc from my hive. It was my first time, as all of this is my first time, so I'm sure I stressed out the bees more than I needed to. But it's done now and I can only hope for the best.
I got to the bottom hive yesterday for the first time in a month and lifted every frame and cleaned off burr comb that was in odd places. I saw some brood, pollen and nector....and larvae so that I can be pretty sure I still have a working queen in there. Unless it took off in all the commotion yesterday while I was doing this work in the hive.
I also looked in the upper deep hive which is jammed with honey. I saw very little brood in there and think that next time, I may need to do something about that but for now, I did nothing with that since I had other work to do.
My one super...where I get my honey...is almost full so I added another super and that will give the bees more space to build it out and make honey. There seems to be enough in bloom so that they can get enough nectar and pollen to work with. The hive is getting tall!
This is what it looked like yesterday after my work was completed. They spent the rest of the evening outside trying to recover from the trauma of my messing with their hive.
To start the nuc, you take about 3 frames from the brood chamber at the bottom. You want to make sure you insert frames that have brood, eggs or tiny larvae, nectar and pollen. With those ingredients, they will make their own queen within a few weeks. With this nuc, I only want it to be strong enough to survive the winter and then in the spring, I will add the five frames to a new hive...and not have to spend the money on purchasing a nuc from someone else. We'll see.
Next thing I needed to do is move the nuc a few miles from my home. Otherwise, the bees would just go back to their original hive (their home) rather than make the nuc their home. So I drove it up to my daughter's land and found a great spot there with lots of wildflowers around...and away from the family.
Notice the orange wheel in the front. That spins around so that you can open it fully to give bees full access to come and go. But there could be stealing from other bees so I opened only one of the holes to minimize the threat. It's secured with a wingnut in the center.
This morning, I needed to take the nuc away from here and so lifted it and placed it on the floor of the backseat of my car. All of a sudden, I see bees everywhere! I hadn't secured the front! So they were flying at me, all over the car. I ran in, donned my beekeepers hat, veil, gloves, and ran back out to close up the opening. A bee got up my pant leg so I stripped them off getting just one sting. Then I decided I needed long pants and socks to tuck my pants into. Then I went back out to deal with it. I started my smoker. Then tightened the wingnut so it was closed. The bees then went into my trunk, just in case there were a few I missed crawling on the outside of the box. You can see I used duck tape to secure the top. Then I drove them about 5 miles away.
Wow, that's a lot of adrenaline for first thing in the morning! I doubt I'll ever forget to tighten the wingnut again. :)
I picked up this hive from my daughter's land and it was all intact. It was there for a few weeks. Now it's back here next to my more mature hive and I've added a feeder to the top of it as well. I need to pick up some cement blocks to set it on. Right now, it's on a tree stump but it isn't secure enough to my liking.
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