Upon another inspection this week I noticed the green hive was missing the queen and it seemed like over half the bees that overwintered were missing. I am not sure what happened, perhaps colony collapse or maybe something just happened to the queen. It also seems like the queen had not started laying eggs yet, so the poor workers could not make a new queen.
This means that we are two colonies short from our desired number of four and this has helped me decide to do a hive split. A hive split is where you taks some frames (say 3) from a healthy hive and put them in am empty hive. You make sure the frames have eggs or young larva on them. The workers on the moved frames will realize that the new hive has no queen and will raise some of the larva to be the queen. Then we have a new hive. I will know in two weeks if it is a success.
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