Today I split my hive. I took the queen and put her in the nuc along with 2 frames of brood and 1 frame of honey, 1empty frame and 1 empty frame of drawn-out comb. That left my big hive queen less hopefully they will make a new one.

Look in a couple more days and you should find queen cells. Use care when handling frames with cells on them.

Al

I was planning on cutting out all but 2 or 3. To try to keep them from reswarming. What do you think should I do that.

First off I would have did a true split instead of a making a nuc if I was worried about the colony swarming.

A true split is taking half the bees, in my case one of the deeps and setting it on a double screen board, use a cloak board if you want them to make their own queen and just the screen board if you add a queen form a nuc or buy one.

But with what you did I would probably cut away a bunch of the cells but I seem to always miss a few.

Al

Thanks for the info. I really didn't want to do a split. But I was told the are going to swarm. They said that should help if I get most of the queen cells.

To prevent a swarm when queen cells are present in the hive I do a artificial swarm. Take the queen and roughly half the bees to a new deep.
I tried the cutting out of queen cells and it just never worked for me, I always missed one some place.


Al

That's the way I understand it you can never get them all. That's why I just took the queen and a couple frames of brood to make her think she swarmed. The guy told me to get as many queen cells as I can but to make sure I leave as least 3 he said the new queen should kill the rest and hopefully they won't reswarm. Like I said before l didn't even want to do a split till next spring but I also didn't want to risk losing half my bees to a swarm. Odds are I'll be at work when they do

Here's an update on my split. It didn't work. the queen either flew away or was killed. As it turns out when I did the split there was 2 queens in the hive. I know this because after 9 days I was looking for queen cells and I found eggs and young larvae and the new queen