It's time we split

Well this is chaos, isn't it. When we arrived, this was a single neat, tidy hive, with bees peacefully coming and going, feeding their young and filling comb with honey. It is the colony that produced spectacular queen cells 3 days ago. I took the cells away on the last visit and left the bees for a few days to see if queen-rearing is their settled intention. Nothing quite so dramatic today, but they have put eggs in small, protruding cups of wax that they will, in a few more days, extend into fully-blown queen cells again

Left to their own devices, the queen may leave in a swarm with many of the bees, and we would be left with a much-reduced colony in recovery mode, raising a replacement. The standard husbandry practice to deal with this is to split the colony in two, mimicking what they would otherwise do themselves, but, crucially, keeping the queen and all the bees here in the apiary

So the queen, on a frame of brood - along with an empty frame for her to lay in, and a frame of honey for them to eat - is in the little box on the left, with a relatively small retinue of workers. Hopefully, she will settle down - content that she has the new home she craved - and build the small colony up to a useful size

The bulk of the colony remains in the original hive, here dismantled on the right. They have the task of raising a replacement queen, just as they were intending to do, and they keep posession of the honey store (the shallow box at the front, with bees spilling out of it), which they can keep filling while the queen-rearing cycle proceeds

One detail to observe: the grass 'moustache' on the small box on the left is a plug in the entrance. It will keep the queen and her workers shut in until they have adjusted to their new situation and the queen is laying. It may wither and fall out in tomorrow's sun. We will drop by tomorrow evening and check - or pull it out if it hasn't happened. Hopefully, by then, the split is irreconcilable and the two parties will not attempt to get back together - they need to accept the new reality and move on!