First year beekeeper seeking advice on walk away split results
Hi all - first year beekeeper in the Netherlands. Last Saturday a beekeeper from our association advised me to perform a walk away split on one of my hives after seeing the large amount of bees. I did check for swarm cells, but didn't find any. This hive had two brood boxes, so after checking both boxes for eggs, larva, food and pollen, I simply pulled one of the boxes off and put it in another spot in our communal apiary.
This morning I went to check on them, mainly to remove extra queen cells from the queen less hive (which I still had to identify). The queen right hive was doing fine, there was lots of open brood. But what I found in the queen less hive confused me: there were two large queen cells, but it looked like they were destroyed by the bees. They were empty. There were also three small open queen cells (not much larger than play cups), in one of them I could clearly see royal jelly, the other two I am not so sure about.
What should I do in this situation? Is my best bet to wait a week, check if the queen cells are capped and add young open brood from another hive if they aren't?