DHS and swarm prevention

In this hive I didn't see any swarm cell, but it was busting at the seams.  I checker boarded the brood chamber that completely filled the deep.  I pulled 3 frames and put in empty frames, the 3 that I pulled I put together in the middle of the extra deep and put in empty frames around it.  The medium that was on top was full of nectar and pollen so I just replaced it and hope that the 10 empty deep frames will keep the nurse bees busy and the queen more space to lay.  I'm hoping that when I get back from my trip in 12 days that the medium will be capped and the tulip popular should be in flow so I will need to pull anything that is capped and add another medium.

Where the spacer was for the mite treatment the had built a lot of burr comb and had started putting nectar and eggs in it.  It was a shame to have to scrape it out.

Too late to just open brood nest

Today the weather finally got warm enough for me to do the work what was so needed.

Ideally you want to prevent swarming and not have to split. But if there are queen cells I usually put every frame with any queen cells in it's own nuc with a frame of honey and let them rear a queen. This usually relieves the pressure to swarm and gives me very nice queens.~Michael Bush, see last post.

When I went into the hive today I found several queen cells so I made two splits with the cells.  One hive has the medium frames w/ the queen cells and the other one has all the queen cells on deep frames.  I also moved the original hive down and put the splits original hive was.  This should catch the returning field bees to the splits.

I'm hoping this will keep the original hive from swarming.  We'll see.