Before taking any drastic steps in this crisis I phoned a very experienced local beekeeper for advice. Following his recommendations we have decided to go ahead with the colony divide, just as we had been planning to do before the queen swarmed away.
This may sound odd, with such a small colony to split, but the logic is that if there is just a slim chance of our single queenless colony surviving then there's double that slim chance if we have two small colonies in the same situation.
The best part of this plan for me is that I can now save two of those seven precious queen larvae - one for each hive. If one of them turns out to be a complete genetic dead-end (it's very hard to tell her character when she just looks like a grub) then there's still her sister in the hive next door. It also means that there is a desperately slim chance that both queens will each be as fabulous as their mother was and will each raise their own colonies to the same strength that Amidala did last year.
It was quite late in the day by the time we'd reached this decision (having spent a large part of it fruitlessly searching for the departed swarm!) so we had to do a bit of a rush job in clearing a site for the second hive. I quickly fetched all the components while my wife started hacking the nettles back.
There wasn't enough time to do a proper job of preparing the ground at all, like I had for the other hive. Just for now it will have to be enough to lay the crates on a flat board for stability - at least this hive won't be so tall as the other was last week (I'm trying hard to think of losing all those food reserves as a positive thing!)
The stand with the landing board sits on top. We decided to position both hives facing in the same direction as it makes it easier to avoid standing in a flight path during an inspection.
The varroa floor goes on next, followed by the empty brood box sitting on top.
The empty frames go in next.
There are 12 frames in these brood boxes so we need to put in six empty frames, three each side of the centre. We won't be doing an exact 50:50 split because this new colony will start at a huge disadvantage - every bee which has already learned to fly will navigate back to the other hive when it flies out to forage and only the house bees which are not old enough to have done their initial flights yet will treat this hive as their permanent home and stay here.
For this reason we selected the six frames (marked A) for the new colony, leaving in this original hive the four frames (marked B) plus the two mostly unused frames we put in last week (the ones at each end).
Of course we had to make sure that just one open queen cell with a healthy looking larva swimming in a pool of royal jelly goes into each hive. Unfortunately I couldn't get a photo which was in focus and we didn't have time to mess about trying to for long!
With all the frames in place, this new brood box shown above is completed.
Above is pictured the original hive with four full frames, two quite empty ones, and six completely empty ones.
Of course there is now a massive amount of wax building to be done by these small colonies but there are enough honey reserves for this purpose. We split the honey stores almost equally - one full super on each hive and a small amount extra in the 2nd super on the original hive. I think we've done all we can to give these colonies the best chance possible, now we just have to hope for the best...
