Looks like the splits are doing great! I was a little late getting to two of the hives, but the girls don't seem to have minded. They have plenty of queen cells to go around! 👑 Prior to the nectar flow a split is a great way to create a brood break in a hive for a more effective Oxalic Acid vapor treatment. Typically varroa mites feed and breed on honeybee brood. At just a few days old, honeybee larvae are given enough food to get them through the last weeks of their development. Nurse bees then cover the larvae under the safety of capped honeycomb cells where the brood and their food are sealed. 🚼🍼 Varroa mites get into the cells and hide on the tiny baby bees before the cells are capped, then feed and breed on the baby bees. Ew! Beekeepers can interrupt this cycle, expose the mites, and increase the efficacy of our mite treatments with a brood break. In this case, I split the original hive into two hives by moving the queen and a few frames of brood to a new location. 🐝 At day 21 after removing the queen from the original hive there will be no capped brood. No capped brood means all the varroa mites hanging out in the hive will be phoretic (attached to bees or walking around). Phoretic mites have zero protection from cell cappings. At day 21 this hive will get treated with oxalic acid vapor and the mite population will be decimated 🧨💥 #GeorgiaGrown #NowMoreThanEver #Honeybees #VarroaTreatment #Beekeeper #OhHoney #RawHoney https://www.instagram.com/p/CPWDKJDjbpm/?utm_medium=tumblr