Quick trip to the outyard to check. I left 2 galleons of feed on all the hives 2.5 weeks ago. Three of the 4 are really in rough shape. I didn’t see much bee bread or stores of honey/sugar.
One hive still had 1.5 g of feed on it, but didn’t take it for some reason
The best hive was at 10 frames and doing well. I found the queen and put her in a 3 frame split to the side. Then split the remaining hive in two, let them go queen-less for an hour and then gave them each a Corey Stevens queen. It will take a few days for the bees to chew thru the queen candy.
Each new split was given 2 gal of feed, save the original queen, who only got a quart jar as that was the only feeder I had left.
Yesterday, at the home yard, I split the queen-less hive in two and gave one a Corey queen and let the other keep the queen cells. It should take 2 weeks to hatch and a week or two to lay, but I get a free queen out of it.
The big hive that was beginning to make honey, I used all the 2nd level deep brood frames to make 2 new nucs. Using the last 2 Corey queens
