How did I get this so wrong?

[BigAshW]

Ok guys I need some feedback to see what I did wrong here.

I have a mated queen in a mini nuc who is running out of bees in the cold weather.

I also have a small swarm collected that I'm waiting to see if they have a mated queen before doing anything with.

The third colony in this story is a nuc I overwintered from a tree fall last year whose queen has turned out to be pretty poor with a bit of chalkbrood and a shotgun pattern but has built up enough to split into two nucs.

So my plan today was to take advantage not a gap in the weather to take the queen from the mating nuc put her in a cage and make a nuc from the failing queen and introduce the new queen.

Because the old queen is very dark and produces dark bees and her mark has rubbed off I set up a shaker box to one side of the apiary and shook the frames down through the excluder to find her.

Having found her and caged her up I then put some brood frames in the new nuc.

I then sourced bees from the bottom of the shaker box. My theory being that the foragers would have flown back to the original site and the nurse bees would have gone down. So i tipped them in a bucket and banged that a couple of times as well to send any remaining foragers in the air and then tipped them into the nuc with the brood frames. And hung the new queen in a cage in the new nuc.

So I now should have a nuc with capped brood and young bees and a caged queen.

It was at this point I realised I was missing the plastic part of the feeder so after swearing at myself a bit I popped home and went back with it.

This took about forty minutes.

When I got back I found the front of the nuc like this!
I looked inside and most of the bees had gone!

I'm assuming they've flown back to the original hive.

There is not a spot of bee pop on the original hive or in it so I had no suspicions of Nosema with them.

So my question is what did I do wrong and what do I do now.

There's maybe a hundred bees left in the nuc with the caged queen.

Do I just go to the original colony kill the queen and hang the cage and not split at all?

 

[Erichalfbee]

Ok guys I need some feedback to see what I did wrong here.

I have a mated queen in a mini nuc who is running out of bees in the cold weather.



Do I just go to the original colony kill the queen and hang the cage and not split at all?

That's what I would do. Take the tab out straight away.
Not much point in splitting a poorly performing colony. What has the poorly performing queen got left with? A smaller colony. Just squash her.

 

[BigAshW]

That's what I would do. Take the tab out straight away.
Not much point in splitting a poorly performing colony. What has the poorly performing queen got left with? A smaller colony. Just squash her.

My plan was to leave her in as a caretaker for a couple of weeks while the third queen was getting sorted although thinking back I guess the newly mated queen could have done that just as easily.

 

[Erichalfbee]

My plan was to leave her in as a caretaker for a couple of weeks while the third queen was getting sorted although thinking back I guess the newly mated queen could have done that just as easily.

Yes but what's the point of trying to get an extra colony with all the pitfalls in the way?
Let the newly introduced queen build up then split

 

[BigAshW]

Yes but what's the point of trying to get an extra colony with all the pitfalls in the way?

Because I have two fresh queens in need of more resources. So the plan was to split this colony in two to share between them.

That was my thinking anyway. It appears to have been wrong.

 

[Erichalfbee]

Because I have two fresh queens in need of more resources. So the plan was to split this colony in two to share between them.

That was my thinking anyway. It appears to have been wrong.

Ah...I thought you had just the one

I have a mated queen in a mini nuc who is running out of bees in the cold weather.

 

[BigAshW]

Ah...I thought you had just the one

Yes sorry that could have been clearer.

So I have the queen in the mini nuc who was almost out of bees so I needed to do something about it.

I also have a queen from a tiny swarm who will need boosting.

So the resources of the two hives was to be split between the two.
However I wanted to give the swarm queen a while To check she was laying and settled so planned to leave the failing queen Insitu to babysit for a week or two. If that makes sense?

 

[Erichalfbee]

So the swarm is in a poly nuc and can be boosted when your other colony can afford it

 

[BigAshW]

So the swarm is in a poly nuc and can be boosted when your other colony can afford it

Yes

Thinking back I made things too complicated and was thinking too far ahead.

Lesson learned, solve the immediate problem first then worry about the next one.