Completed a split

It's been a stressful few days for this new beekeeper.  I few days ago, I noticed the bees were making a queen cell, and a few weeks ago they were making drone comb.  All in preparation for them to swarm.  They don't know it, but now is not a good time of year for them to be swarming.  They would split the population in two and it's possible that neither half would survive.  Here's the picture of the queen cell.

Once I found the queen cells, the best thing to do was to take my good queen and move her to another box.  The only problem is that I didn't have another box.  Yesterday, my brother helped me put together a couple top bar "nucleus" boxes.  These are top bar hives that are about a foot long--enough for about eight bars of comb. 

These are screened on the bottom like my full size hive to try to keep the varroa might population down.

Today I got into the hive to look for the queen.  Thankfully she is marked, especially since I am so near-sighted.  So, while I was looking for her, I also needed to find comb without any swarm cells to move to the new hive with her.  What I found was very few combs without swarm cells.  It also turns out that the original swarm cell I found out was one of the newest ones.  I found one that was nearly ready to be capped.  That's also the time when the old queen would swarm.

Oh, and while I had the hive open, I hornet flew into the hive.  The bees got on it right away and pulled her out of the hive.

I finally got both hives put back together.  We'll see what happens next.