The Hot Hive, Conclusion

So--back to last summer's hot hive. I had a few choices: kill it, split it, or move it to the country. I decided to split it. A friend came over to help watch my toddler and view the process. She's a new beekeeper, and I was a little worried about putting her off beekeeping.

I suited up: gloves, boots, full suit. I checked the zippers and hook-and-loop fasteners to make sure I was sealed up. I don't mind being stung, but this hive gave me an unpleasant feeling I'd never had around bees before. They were attacking me in force from the moment the lid came off. They were mad, and they were determined.

Of course, I'm anthropomorphizing. Bees don't get mad. They respond to stimuli. So let me phrase it this way: these bees seemed to ignore smoke, and responded to the lid coming off defensively. Whereas some hives will send one or two bees over to ping off the veil, these bees moved in a group, and didn't bother with warning pings. The moment the lid was off, I was enveloped in a cloud of bees, many of whom were trying with what seemed like desperation to get into my veil. Others were stinging my gloves over and over. They weren't warning me. They were straight on trying to get rid of me. After it was over, my friend did say that it was intimidating to watch: there was a constant swirl of bees around me, a cloud that followed me a good 50 yards or more.

I knew I would never be able to find the queen in such a huge hive. The original queen had been marked, but I was pretty sure this change in attitude had come about due to supercedure. The hive had come through all of the previous season and part of this one as a calm, productive, well-mannered hive. The relatively sudden change had to mean a new queen--one who had mated with drones who had attitude.

Since I wouldn't be able to go through the hive to find the queen (especially with a tornado of bees swirling around my head), I decided to split the hive into three parts, then return in a few days to see who  had eggs. Find the queen then, in a smaller hive, squish her, and replace. There was also a chance that without honey and broken into smaller hives, the bees would settle down.

The split went without particular incident. I put down a stand and new bottom board, pulled the top brood box, and put it on the stand. Then I got a nuc box, and pulled frames to fill it from both top and bottom brood boxes. I didn't worry about balancing the boxes' stores and bees; I hoped to reunite the whole thing in a couple of weeks with a new queen.

I put drawn comb in the brood boxes to make up for the frames in the nuc. I now had one nuc and two deeps. I knew that foragers would likely go back to the original hive, and hoped that they would take the bad attitude with them. Maybe the nuc and the box at the new location would be sweet without the mean old bees.

In the meantime, I had two nice queens on order. I figured I would introduce a queen into the nuc and one brood box, in hopes that one would take. Smaller hives usually accept a queen more easily, so my bet was on the nuc. I figured if one queen survived, she would head up the new, reunited hive. If both survived, I could just go with the split. It was late in the season--August already--but most years we have a good fall flow, and I could always feed.

I lucked out. The queen was in the nuc. What was less lucky is that the hives' attitude hadn't sweetened one iota for having been split. Even the nuc was mean, all five frames of it, with bees coming out to meet me the moment the hive tool went under the lid.

One queen went into the nuc, one into a hive body. I waited a week, the queens were laying eggs, and so I recombined the nuc with the queenless hive body. I have to admit I didn't check it for queen cells, though there must have been by then. I assumed my replacement queen would take care of that. I added a second hive body to the other requeened box. And called it good.

They both did manage to work a goldenrod flow and do ok, but I didn't open them again that season. One had plenty of stores (the one on the original stand). The second seemed light. I will admit, though, that I was done with them. I had another hive that had made a nice 30 lb surplus on the fall flow, so I had that to extract and bottle, as well as a toddler to take care of. They would make it or they wouldn't, but they'd had all the attention I was going to give them.

I will say that I requeened with a small bit of regret. This hive had boomed and make a 60 lb surplus in a season when no one was getting much honey at all, due to overcast, cool weather. I loved their honey making genes. I loathed their attitude.

Neither requeened hive made it. The light one starved, the second apparently started raising brood too early, and choose to keep it warn rather than move up to the 40 pounds above their heads.

In the end, I could have saved myself the trouble and expense of requeening by putting a trash bag over the hive. But I'm still glad I did it. It was a heck of an experience, and I feel like I'll know what to do when (if?) it happens again.