splitting

[Kurt Bower]

Oh if only the honey flow was on.
I have never seen such a build up of bees this early before.
After going through all of my hives today I am facing a troubling spring. I made 2 splits today to prevent swarming (fully capped swarm cells observed).
75% of my hives are loaded with bees and will have to be split or manipulated in some way or I will be losing my honey crop.
For those who have not went through your bees yet, I would encourage doing so as soon as possible.

[drewgrim]

can you split a hive that is packed out into more than two hives? for instance create a few nucs from it? think its too early to do that?

[Jacobs]

The main question is, if you cannot buy a mated queen, what is the drone situation in your area? I have several hives at my house with somewhat different genetics, and 4 of them have drones flying. I also know of a few other beekeepers in easy bee flight distance from me with drones flying in some of their hives. Given the drone situation around me, I would be willing to make a split and try and get the new queen mated. The situation will get even better in the next couple of weeks if the weather continues to be warm and more hives produce drones.

If you are in an area that has few honey bee colonies around other than yours, you will have difficulty making a split and having the queenless part successfully requeen on its own.

Another lesson I learned, forgot, and learned the hard way--if you are going to let a split or nuc make its own queen, use blue or green painters tape or something like it to make distinctive patterns on the front of the hive. You want a queen that is going up for a mating flight to have the best chance possible for recognizing her hive and returning to it rather than entering a neighboring hive and being killed.

[Jacobs]

I made 2 splits, each with 10 medium frames today. I made them the same way, but for 2 different reasons. In each case I found and marked the queen and put her in 2 medium nuc boxes with frames of honey, pollen, capped brood, and a frame of drawn open comb. I left the vast majority of bees in their original hives to make a new queen.

The first split is far from my strongest hive, but it is the sole genetic descendent of the original bee tree queen from Wally's removal party of a few years back. I can keep an eye on her in the nuc and can pull eggs to put back in the original hive if the first re-queening attempt is not successful.

The second split is from my strongest hive--a deep and 5 mediums with bees in every box. I wanted a queen that will be easy to find and put in an observation hive for school presentations. Stadiem came over and helped me with this one. We saw several queen cups and 2 queen cells with royal jelly and larvae in them. I would have thought this hive would have been further along in swarm preparations. This hive had the high mite count on the sticky board I brought to the beginners class. This split will provide some brood interruption for mite control, hopefully stop potential swarming for now, and provide a strong foraging force with little to no brood to feed as the nectar flow increases. I gave them open drawn comb in the top super in place of the brood, pollen, and honey we removed.

Now I will treat the two queenless hives as if I grafted larvae today and use the calculator in our useful links category to easily figure queen development schedules.

It was a fun day in the bees.

[p51d]

I have one killer hive with lots of bees with a double brood setup. To prevent swarming I generally checkerboard so I am glad to see Kurt's and Jacob's responses.

The question - checker board on brood and make one split? Remove a brood and replace it with new frames and possibly make two nucs? I have to let them make queens. Lost a bunch of my hives so it is a rebuilding year.

Also, after the main flow, does anyone make splits later in the year? June -July timeline and just feed them to get them where they need to be for winter. That way I checkerboard and hopefully still have a honey season.

This year looks like a rebuilding year for me.

Thanks for the answers to my questions.

[Jacobs]

I haven't done a lot of checker boarding. I have been more haphazard. The closest to checker boarding I have done was to create space in a honey bound hive.

Whether to make more nucs or checker board and split depends on whether you are more interested in getting more colonies or in making honey. I still like the idea of putting the queen in a nuc and letting whatever else you make attempt to requeen. More foragers in one hive with less brood to care for gives the potential for more honey. Egg frames, or better yet, queen cell (with royal jelly & larva) frames in a new queenless nuc with honey, pollen, nurse bees and some capped brood gives a good base for a new colony. The more nucs, the fewer house bees in the original hive to mature into foragers in the next several weeks as the nectar flow starts to build.

At the State meeting a couple of years ago, Dr. Marterre from Forsyth gave a presentation in which I believe he said the first week in July was about the latest you would want to attempt making a nuc and try to have it requeen. At that point the number of drones flying starts to drop significantly. (If I have mis-remembered the time frame, someone please correct me.)

I'm not sure this is what you were looking for. I hope others will jump in--especially if they see something I have overlooked.

[Jacobs]

If things are on schedule, the 2 March 16th splits should have queens emerging today. Both hives were active this afternoon and foragers were bringing in pollen. I take this as a hopeful sign so far. The temperatures do not look good for mating flights on the days these would normally take place, but queens can delay flights for awhile if weather conditions are not good. I hope we will have a warming trend in the near future.

I went ahead and put odd patterns of blue painters tape on the front of 1 hive and green painters tape on the other hive. This should increase the chances of the queens orienting and finding their way back to the right hive when they do fly.

[Jacobs]

I got the old stethoscope out this morning and was able to hear piping in one of the hives!

[Jacobs]

The March 16th splits should have had queens on mating flights Tuesday or Wednesday. I suppose they will be delaying until around Tuesday of next week and its 70 degree temperatures. Both hives are still active, purposeful, and were bringing in some pollen yesterday afternoon.

[Jacobs]

O.K. Wally, here is a question for you. I have not seen the activity around a hive when a queen goes up for a mating flight. Is it anything like the start of a small swarm? The bee tree hive just put out what looked like the start of a small swarm. I "tanged" and within 5 minutes the bees returned to the front of the hive, fanned heavily for a few minutes, went back in and all is calm.

This is a hive I least expected to attempt a swarm since it was not overly strong and should have made a new queen that is due to be mated. The original queen is in a nuc.

[Wally]

I have heard there will be a number of bees accompany the queen on her flight, but I have never witnessed a mating flight, so I can't say how many that would be.

[Jacobs]

Both of the original hives appear to have successfully requeened. I'll keep an eye on the laying patterns and try to locate and mark these queens soon.

[p51d]

when is too late to split a hive?

My last strong hive I had plenty of room, they swarmed. Dang it. Too far up to get them.

Now I have two new packages from Brushy Mountain. They are find, yet I only have two and the flow (to me) looks to be poor. If so,I am thinking if checker boarding and trying to get two more hives running.

Hopefully I was only a statistic and others fared better. Quite strange with my losses. They had stores, did not starve or did not look to have froze. (One hive froze)

[pholcomb]

I did my first hive split on Wed 6/5. The hive was brimming so each of the new hives got 2 mediums of brood and a medium of stores. The queenless hive got the original hive location, and I put some blue tape on it in an X pattern to help the emerging queen orient. Both hives have remained strong after the split.

I decided to do a June split because I wanted to wait until there were plenty of drones flying from the new package of Wayne's bees that I installed back in April. The genetics of the new hive will be a mix of New World Carniolan's courtesy of Larry Tate, who supplied me with my original packages last year, Wayne's Bees, also courtesy of Larry Tate (and Wally), and Italian mutts from nearby beekeepers.

Hopefully the virgin queen will take her mating flights over the next few days. Should I check for eggs early next week?

Paul

[Jacobs]

I would use the queen rearing calendar in our "useful links" section of the forum board.

http://www.guilfordbeekeepers.org/commu ... f=6&t=1443

If you did not have queen cells (with royal jelly and larvae) on the frames in the queenless portion, I would treat the "grafting" date as the date you made the split. This assumes that your brood frame has newly hatched larvae and that the bees will choose these. Bees being bees, they can do something different, but this is a reasonable approximation of what to expect when.

[pholcomb]

I didn't see any queen cells when I split, but I didn't pull every frame so I could have missed a cell. Just made sure I had plenty of larvae. The calendar is pretty cool. Thanks.

Paul

[pholcomb]

Finally got around to opening the hives that I created from the split in early June. Didn't spot the new queen but I've posted two pics of her handiwork. These frames were pulled out of the top box (of three 8 frame mediums.) There was some capped brood in the bottom box but the pattern was much more sparse.

Could someone with an experienced eye comment on this pattern? Looks ok to me, but this is my first split. Much appreciated.

Paul

[Wally]

Looks OK for a new queen, but I would hope for better next month.

[pholcomb]

Thanks Wally. I'll take another look in a couple weeks.

Paul