I just spend the craziest day in my apiary... did not see this coming. As some of you know, I lost one hive out of my two late this spring. The regional bee inspector came to my place today to help me check things out. After we looked at the dead hive frames and took test samples, we went out to the remaining healthy hive to see what's what. Since I am a newbie and have never done a split before, I ask him to help me. Well shit... we had enough bees to do a triple split!! He said I had a BOOMING hive.
So, one becomes 3 just like that. I will have to check in a week and again and again to make sure the 2 splits make their queens and the queens do all the things. But for today, I am ecstatic. Here is a pic of the inspector and me figuring out which frames to put in which boxes. I am putting the inner cover on split one while the inspector looks on. The other photo shows some of the gazzilion bees in that one hive.
And my beautiful yellow dot Queen was put into a nuc box for an hour to keep safe while we did the rest. And I also have enough honey from last year to feed all 3 hives without extra syrup. This makes me doubly happy. This spring has been a rollercoaster but today was a win.