It's Passover and Easter and beautiful spring all rolled into one. So, I checked both hives today. I thought I might have been able to use the excluder to divide one of the hives passively. I'm not really sure. I'll come back to that in a minute.
The other hive had a shallow on top with a queen cell in. The Queen cell is open, there seem to be some larvae. The brood box on the bottom had no built out foundation yet except what I had to put in.
I reversed the order of the boxes so that if the queen is out and mated and back in laying eggs things will be fine. The bees will be able to build the foundation in the upper brood box. I gave her some drawn out foundation that she can lay in. I did notice some drone cells in the brood box before I moved it. We'll see what happens with that.
So back to the idea of passively splitting the hive with two brood boxes by putting a queen excluder in and waiting to see where the Queen was.The boxes are full of bees but I couldn't tell where the Queen was so I decided to leave the excluder in for another week and see what's happening. They are bringing in pollen which would indicate that there are brood that they want to feed. There were also stores from the sugar water I've been feeding them. That was true of both boxes. Now that it's April when they have stores I will stop feeding them.
The weather continues to be cool at night so perhaps these boxes are just getting a slower start than the other hives in town. We'll see what happens next week or probably in two weeks.
Photo: Busy boxes before reversing order
