About 10 days ago I opened a hive and found it loaded up with q-cells...maybe 8 capped and a bunch about to be.
That evening I found the queen and pulled her and 4 frames for a split.
I also pulled 4 frames loaded with bees and 2 caped cells, put them in a 8 frame box with some empty frames and moved this split down to a friends about 2 miles away.
well, I got a call from my friend 2 days ago that she had found a small swarm in the yard which she is pretty sure did not come from her hive.
I don't mind the split swarming, I told her to take the bees (I was out of town). But it does make me wonder a couple things:
Was it a mistake to leave more than one capped cell in the split?
could I have done anything else (without any empty drawn comb) to avoid it? Or were the bees just so far down the path to swarming that it was going to happen no matter what I did?
I don't know if either the parent hive or the split with the original queen swarmed, I was out of town. But another friend house sitting didn't notice anything. I plan to peek in on everybody tomorrow now that I am home.
First, confirm it was your hive. I doubt very seriously that it was. No, you didn't do anything wrong. Two cells is the accepted standard with swarm cell splits.
Well, I will check today or tomorrow and see if the split seems depleted, not sure if I would really be able to tell. It got made right at sundown and moved that night, it was kind of intentional and kind of when I had time. But the hope was to deplete the population of the parent hive as much as possible.
Earlier in the season I had another hive that went through the exact same cycle. all those splits stayed in the yard. The parent hive then proceeded to send out a swarm 8 days later and another 3 days after that. I had thought that perhaps removing the combs and then allowing the field force to return just made them feel more crowded than before? So this time I wanted to take some of the field force away as well.
The friend have kept a pretty careful watch on their hive (they are new too) and have seen no swarm cells, and the swarm was pretty small (in the picture) maybe half a football worth. I suppose it could have come from anywhere but it settled right between their hive and my split.