Split made

Beekeepers at work

I had emailed Kathy Niven regarding making a nuc and she graciously came over this afternoon to assist me.  In the process of making the nuc I learned some new things and made some discoveries.
I need to correct (emend? amend?) something I said in the last post.  In regards to the nectar in the cells in the brood frames, I had said that I thought the bees were making this a honey frame- incorrect.  Bees will flood new-laid eggs with nectar, so this was an area of eggs.
When we looked at the frames in the bottom honey super, there was capped brood and drone cells in the lower third of many of them.  That is why some people use a queen excluder.  Until these last inspections, I had thought that there was only brood in the top brood box.  In fact, the brood area extends from the bottom of the bottom box through the top brood box and into the bottom of the first super. That queen is really working hard!
Here's how we made the nuc.  Because we saw the queen, we put her with the frame of brood and nurse bees into the nuc.  Kathy thinks that it is more assured that the parent hive will make a new queen.  I also think it gets the nuc off to a quicker start because it already has a laying queen rather than the three weeks or so to make a queen, for her to mate and then start laying.  One of the sources I used actually discourages walk-away splits for that reason and says to either use a queen or at least queen cells.  We then added two more frames with capped and emerging brood.  The fourth frame had honey and pollen and the fifth was an empty frame with drawn comb.  Selecting which combs to use took some looking and the girls got a bit upset.  I got one sting on my index finger through the glove.  When all five frames were in the nuc, we placed it on the stand that previously held #3, shook another frame of nurse bees into it and closed it up.   Kathy wisely pointed out the need for a cover in light of the upcoming rain and suggested a brick to keep the cover from blowing away.  Looking at the nuc later on, I saw ants on the stand so I placed bowls under the legs and filled them with water.

But wait, there's more!  Kathy advised "checker-boarding" comb with honey and empty comb in the top super to encourage the bees to go up there to draw comb and make more honey.  This is a well established manipulation and one more thing I now know about.  It was in doing this that I discovered the brood in the lower super.
Finally, over coffee (see above picture), I asked Kathy about hive #2.  She suggested putting a frame of drawn comb between two frames of brood so the queen will have more room to lay.  Later in the afternoon, I did just that.
In a week I will take a look into #1 to see if there are any queen cells.  I'll look into #2 to see if there are eggs/brood in the frame I inserted today.