Bees in the TBH, take 2

Today I took a thorough inventory of what the bees had built in the hive and decided to take the plunge: I split the hive. There were two brood frames with a queen cell each on them. So I took those frames, another with lots of brood and two frames with honey, nectar and pollen and put them into my TBH. I added two brood bars and a follower board and put both hives back together, putting fresh frames in the empty slots in the old hive. By this time the bees sounded irritated and I was hot & tired so I went away for a break.

My plan was to set up a false swarm: to leave the queen in the Langstroth hive and force the bees on the hives to raise a new queen for themselves. (It is a great plan - as long as the existing queen is where she's supposed to be). And I had almost talked myself into believing that the she was most likely on one of the frames I'd left in the Lang.

But as I was about to drive away I decided, in the spirit of Murphy's law, that the odds of something going horribly wrong with anything are directly proportional to the distance you have to drive to fix it. My hives are an hour's drive from my home. That, and the bees in the Lang had not calmed down during my break. If anything they sounded even angrier. So I got back out of the car and went through the TBH frame-by-frame.

And there she was! I found the queen on the second frame I pulled. So I yanked the outer cover off the Lang hive and gingerly set the bottom edge of the frame down on the inner cover. The queen was a regular Cheshire cat; appearing and disappearing among the masses of nurse bees. After a few very long minutes I managed to get her to walk up my hive tool far enough for me to flick it slightly and drop her near the hole in the inner cover.

I got one last glimpse of her as she bolted into the hive. Right away the noise of the hive fell to a murmur and the peevish cloud of bees outside the hive entrance vanished. Foragers came and went and the hive hummed along quietly as if nothing had happened.