# Failing split



## beemandan (Dec 5, 2005)

SmokeyHill said:


> Her wings are tattered/shredded on the ends.


Might this be the result of DWV?


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## SmokeyHill (Feb 6, 2018)

It doesn't look like DWV. The wings are not shriveled/malformed as you would expect in DWV, but rather are damaged on the ends. They are fully formed, but are torn. I should have taken a pic of her. It looks like something might have got a hold of her, or she was fighting? No other bees show signs of DWV.
Wondering if the OAV treatment I did to each split during the broodless period may have caused this?


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## JWPalmer (May 1, 2017)

Could be she was attacked while on her mating flight but escaped and was able to return home. I would try option B. I think there is still time to make a queen from a frame of brood if you don't think she will cut it. If that fails, combining is always still an option a month from now. I would also consider moving her into a different nuc with a frame or two of bees, just to see what happens, while the other nuc makes the new queen. Sometimes they are a little slow getting going. I recently had one with a very spotty brood pattern early on that turned solid about three weeks later at the next inspection. Glad I did not pinch her.


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## SmokeyHill (Feb 6, 2018)

I discovered another option while inspecting a swarm I caught back in May. I'm not sure why, but they are superseding their queen. She has a great laying pattern and seems to be doing fine as far as I can tell, but today I found 4 supercedure cells, one capped, one nearly capped and two are charged with larva and RJ. I saw the queen and she seemed to be going about her business. They are not overcrowded and these are not swarm cells. I guess they know better than I do.
Anyway, I'm thinking about brushing the bees off the frame with the two youngest cells on it and giving it to the split (I would pinch the queen or move her to a nuc first). That would at least give them a jump start.


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## SmokeyHill (Feb 6, 2018)

I completely left out one very important thing:

In the failing split, there is a queen cell started, one and only one, with larva and RJ. I don't know that I trust it though. Would the bees know if the egg was a viable queen candidate (fertilized or unfertilized)?


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## Kuro (Jun 18, 2015)

SmokeyHill said:


> I completely left out one very important thing:
> 
> Would the bees know if the egg was a viable queen candidate (fertilized or unfertilized)?


Last summer, a hive swarmed, leaving a somewhat small queen. I thought she was a virgin and got rid of other swarm cells (all capped). One week later, the queen was still small and I realized her wings were damaged, so I removed her. I also found several new queen cells with small larva, but all of them disappeared within a week, before being capped. I guess workers made queen cells on drone larvae, laid either by the defective queen or laying workers.


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## SmokeyHill (Feb 6, 2018)

Update:

I gave the queen in the failing split another week to sort things out, just in case.

This morning I went into the hive to discover nothing had changed. I found the queen on the next to last frame and pinched her. However, upon inspecting the frame further I discovered something disturbing. In a number of the cells, the eggs were not on the bottom of the cells and several had more than one egg in them. Is it possible for a queen-right hive to develop laying workers? My thought is that a very weak/poor queen might just allow this to happen. Or, is it possible the poor queen herself laid those eggs?

Taking a chance, I found a capped queen cell (one of about 5 in another colony) on a frame in another colony and after carefully brushing all the bees off of it, I placed it in the failing split. If this fails, I believe I may just destroy the split rather than trying to correct a laying worker situation.


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