I’m currently running an experiment with my fourth-strongest hive. I’ll share the results once it wraps up—likely today or tomorrow. According to most of what I’ve read, it’s not supposed to work, but I was short on time, and if it fails, it won’t be a significant loss.

Earlier, I found a virgin queen from one of my VSH hives at another yard and brought her over in case I needed a queen. When I arrived, I found that my fifth-strongest hive needed to be split after I discovered a capped swarm cell and an almost-capped, charged supersedure cell. I destroyed both cells, then split the hive: five frames from the bottom deep and five from the second deep, most of which had nearly fully drawn comb.

I left the original 2025 queen in the bottom deep with three frames of capped brood. I added a queen excluder, two undrawn medium supers, then another excluder. On top, I placed the caged virgin queen along with the remaining two frames of capped brood.

It was already 8 p.m., and I still needed to mow that location. I didn’t have what I needed to create a proper queenless setup, so I had to improvise.