early split attempt - upstate NY..... may be too early????

[Finski]

.
Give the queen in the cage to the colony and look how bees react.
If they surround the cage and start to ventilate with wings, the hive is queenless.
If they start to bite the cage, they have a queen.

.there may be a queen, which is sick and cannot lay.
It may have too a virging queen.

[greg755]

Wow Im in CNY and my hives just dont have the population comming out of winter, I'm surprised you would attempt this

[Caelansbees]

At that point you should have saddled up and finished the inspection. 

My first question thou..  If you we're not sure you had a queen or eggs or brood, why are there multiple boxes? How many hives are you running?  Can you snag any open brood from another?

[10framer]

do you have any drones in any of your hives?  if not you need to figure out if you have a queen in the one hive or not (if the queen is still in the cage i'd do what finski said).  if you don't have a queen you need to move the queen from the nuc to that hive and probably just merge that split into the weakest of the three hives until you start seeing drones.  letting the bees raise  an emergency queen does you no good if she can't get mated.

sounds like you need to take a deep breath and regroup.

what time of day did you go through the hives?  bees are all home and more aggressive in the evening.

[dfizer]

.
Give the queen in the cage to the colony and look how bees react.
If they surround the cage and start to ventilate with wings, the hive is queenless.
If they start to bite the cage, they have a queen.

.there may be a queen, which is sick and cannot lay.
It may have too a virging queen.

Ok - here's the situation.  I have the new queen and put it on the landing board of the new hive.  The bees at first didn't really care then after a few minutes they started climbing on top of the cage and looked like they were not happy about her being there.  If anything it looked like they were biting at the cage but one thing for sure.... they were not fanning their wings.  But the time of the observation was only 10 minutes... The cage is there now and im going to leave it there for about an hour and check back.

David

[Finski]

.
You should take inner cover off and put the cage on top bars.
Cage's place is between frames

[dfizer]

Thanks Finski - but I know that is where you put the queen to install her however I was very short on time and just wanted to see how the existing hive would take to her.  As I  stated earlier - they were every "meh" at first then once they realized what she was it looked like they were trying to maul her.  Once I got home - about an hour ago - I went out to the hive to check and there was not bee one near her cage.  I'm kind of at a loss for what to do.  Although I genuinely think the hive is queen-less there is still that gnawing little paranoid voice in side of me saying that they may indeed have a queen.  Again today - late in the day - there were bees hauling in the pollen.  ugh.

I guess my next step is to contact a local beekeeping associate and get her opinion as to the state of the hive.  If she agrees that it's queen-less the new queen is going in to stay otherwise I'll continue with my split.  Any thoughts?

David

[Finski]

Thanks Finski - but I know that is where you put the queen to install her however

you know. but you have no time to do correctly....
I think that you have too much speed

.

[dfizer]

Profound and perfect assessment.  You are exactly right.  There is so much going on that I cant seem to slow down enough to do things correctly.  Today I will do exactly that - slow down and do it correctly.  More to follow - I have some experienced beekeepers coming over today to have a look - at that point we should know for sure if there is a queen present or not.  After that information is known then the strategy becomes easy to set. 

Thanks again.

David

[dfizer]

I just got to back from inspecting (again) Hive 2 with a friend of mine from a local beekeeping club.  I informed him of my suspicions (queen-less) and after a thorough inspection we came to the conclusion that the hive was queen-less.  I observed exactly what Finski had said a few posts ago which was the bees fanning right in front of the queen cage. 

So we decided that the strategy for moving forward now is to put the Carniolean queen and her 6 attendants into Hive 2.  That took every bit of 3 minutes. 

I am pleased that the plan is in place for this Hive and all is now good.  I'll be getting prepared for the growth that the Carn's are known for....

Thanks again for all the advice and support. 

David