Hi Everyone
Earlier in spring late March early April a fellow beekeeper and I worked one of my hives to split. The hive has two brood boxes and at that time one supper. We found the queen in the bottom box ( we looked through all the boxes) so we took three frames and placed them in another brood box and added three empty fromes with foundation. We made sure the Queen was still on the frame we found her on and put her back in the bottom box, returned the second brood box and then put a queen excluder on under the supper.
In the last three weeks I have noticed a drastic decrease in activity in ths hive so I opened it up only to find that the supper was full of brood with hardly nothing in the two brood boxes Some drawn comb some filled with honey etc:.
I put the super with the brood on the bottom and the brood boxes on top. Should I leave both brood boxes on or should I shake the bees out of the top box and wait untill they fill the first brood box before putting the second box back on?
What do you think happened to the queen in the bottom box? Obvously the supper raised their own. It looks like they would have raised her in the brood box, there certainly was enough room.
I hope to hear from you soon both boxes are still on.
Thanks for any comment
Barnabus
I'm not understanding something.
You put brood frames into the super?
It could be the queen did squeeze through the excluder to get to the "super" brood chamber and then would not go back through the excluder. I would say just remove the excluder .
If you put brood above the excluder bees will often raise a new queen there, but your use of the terms "brood box" and "super" tend to indicate that you have different sized boxes. In that case it's more likely the queen went through the excluder. Not at all an uncommon occurance. Especially if you get carried away with the smoke. Also, could it be you set a super on top of a brood box when working the hive and she moved in then?