Just checking

I did a post-mortem on the failed split. I'm guessing I just did not add enough bees to keep the baby bees fed. It appears that the emerging bees died from starvation. That's just a guess since I did not do any microscopy on the dead bees.

The other split has lots of eggs so there is a new queen in there somewhere. I did not identify her so I'll look again next week. There is still some room in there for the new colony.

I did a quick look into the main hive. There is brood in the top box as well as some additional space. I think I will try making one more split from this hive before the summer goes along too much further. I need to go all the way to the bottom box to see if they are using that box. I'm not sure they are and if not, why not. I want to prepare another box with frames before breaking down that colony.

Checking the splits

Today I checked on my 2 splits. The 10 frame medium looks good with 7 queen cells. I gave them syrup with fumagilin. I also gave the original hive its second dose of fumagilin.

The other split has no queen cells and shows evidence of some disease. I'm not sure what. Right now I'm leaving it alone. I gave it some honey from the dead-out hive, but no additional bees or frames. I'm not sure what to do about that hive so maybe I'll just leave it as an experiment for now to see what happens with the brood in that hive.

Why did one split succeed and not the other? They both came from frames from the main hive. Is it because I was re-using frames from past hives? I'm guessing yes, and I should strip and clean the frames and boxes from previous hives. I need to build my solar melter and start processing wax. Bleach the equipment for safe reuse before trying another split.