Another experiment.....

Late July 2010, As I have been describing the hives I realize now that I spend a lot of time identifying each one to you. So to make things easier I will describe each hive and give it a name.

First, you should know that the 3 hives sit in a North-South row. The hive that survived the winter and then lost it's queen is in the center. This hive has the newest queen and I will call it the middle hive.
The new hive that has never lost it's queen and accepted the failed hive during the merge is the south hive. And the hive that was created by splitting the south hive is called the north hive. Clear? ( I have edited previous posts and added 'north', 'south', and 'middle' to help out if you are just now catching up)

We noticed that the queen in the north hive (created from the split) was not laying very much brood. Dad suggested that she is only laying brood that can be cared for by the workers in the hive. We estimate there is about 200-300 bees total so that kind of makes sense. (the middle hive could have 300,000 - 500,000 bees which is why we could never find the queen)
We decided to conduct another experiment. We took several frames from the middle hive and did the newspaper trick to see if we could merge them to increase the population of the north hive. This experiment came with some risk of course. If the bees did not assimilate, would they just leave? would they kill the queen? would they be treated as intruders and be killed?
Well, it did not work as planned. It appears that if the bees have not been without a queen for a while, they are not interested in becoming part of a new hive and will immediately try to return to their own hive. Thankfully they did not kill the queen, but it is obvious they did not stick around very long once they made it through the newspaper because we still only have a few hundred bees in the north hive.

(this post catches us up to July 29th 2010)