Splitting a hive and new queen

[Becky Hampton]

I have a question regarding splitting a hive. My hive needs to be split - lots of bees, queen cells, drone cells - and I want to split before they swarm. I've watched a lot of You Tube videos and read a good bit of what's on the internet about how to split a hive. From what I gather, the old queen needs to move to the new hive, and then the old hive either makes a queen from a queen cell they have in progress (there are several in the hive!) or you install a new queen into the old hive. As of now, I have a new queen coming in a few days. Here's the question. Does the old hive need to be queenless for a few days prior to introducing the new queen to get rid of the old queen's pheremones? If so, how long? I heard this mentioned on several of the videos but want some advice on this. Can you put the new queen in her cage in the old hive on the same day you split and just wait for them to eat through the candy?

[Jacobs]

I would move the old queen to the new location when making your split. This mimics what happens with a real reproductive swarm. Keep the frames with queen cells on them in the original location. This hive will continue raising the potential new queens, just as hives do after a real swarm. I would not wait until I have a commercial queen to do this. If the bees are ready to swarm before your commercial queen arrives, you may lose your original queen and the bees that go with her. If you make the split now, you may stop or slow the swarming urge.

The trickier part comes with the arrival of your new commercial queen. The new hive should be content in that they are in the process of making a new queen. If a queen or queens have not emerged, you will want to destroy those queen cells in the morning, and introduce your caged queen in the afternoon. Bees sense they are queenless after a few hours and will become more receptive to an introduced queen. I'm not sure if the same is true for bees that are content because they have viable queen cells and are in the process of making a new queen. I don't normally like to destroy queen cells, but I would not leave them in with either the original queen or within a hive in which I was trying to introduce a new queen.

A complicating factor would be if you have queen(s) that have emerged in the new hive before your commercial queen arrives. Your bees may or may not show interest in releasing the caged queen, and if released, there is a possibility of a fight between the caged queen and the newly emerged queen. After this week's experience hiving a package with 2 queens in it, I will now be suspicious if a queen in a cage has not been released after 5-7 days. Before I direct release her, I will try and determine if there is another queen free in the hive.

I hope others will chime in if I have missed something or if they do things in another way for other reasons.

[Becky Hampton]

Thanks, Rob. That was very helpful. I think the split went well yesterday. Found the old queen easily and moved her. We'll see how the 2 hives do!

[mike91553]

If I made a split and left capped queen cells I would need a good reason to introduce a new queen. If my hive was so strong this early that they had queen cells I wouldn't want to change the genetics unless they are aggressive.

[Becky Hampton]

Mike - I've been thinking about that and I'm going to take your advice and forego the commercial queen and just let them raise their own. I was concerned about losing 3 -5 weeks of build up time waiting for the queen to hatch, mate, then start laying because I would like to get honey this year. But they've been gentle bees and the other queen was a good one. I would like for my hives to get more self-sustaining.
Can I assume that after the first queen appears, they'll dispose of the remaining ones in the cells?

[Wally]

If you have capped queen cells, the new queen could be laying in less than 2 weeks. Almost for sure within 3 weeks. Yes, they will adjust the number of queens to one, either by killing them or swarming.

[Becky Hampton]

Well I've had disappointing results with my hive making their own queen. When I split my original hive and took the queen and some frames of brood, I left lots of bees and brood frames that had over 10 capped queen cells in them in the original hive. That was a month ago. By mid month, most of those queen cells were opened. As of yesterday, there was no queen in the hive. There's also no brood. It's all hatched. Even the drone brood has hatched. This past weekend, I took 2 frames of brood with nurse bees to put back into that hive to start to build the numbers back up because they're diminishing, too, and to stave off laying workers. At this point I've ordered a queen which I plan to pick up next week.
So - did I do something wrong? We had some cold weather in mid April. Did that get the queens that might have been out mating? Any thoughts?

[Bsummitkeeper]

It's hard to imagine having multiple queen cells and not ending up with a queen but many things could have happened to cause it. It could be a simple as the first emerging queen killing all the others in their cells and then getting ate by a bird on one of her mating flights.

I always try and make my own queen from a strong hive when possible instead of buying a queen because I have no real idea of the new queens genetics. Considering that even with a new queen your not going to get enough buildup at this point to make honey I would have taken a frame with brood eggs and larva from my best hive (which means I'd be getting new bees with at least half of my best queens genetics) and try and let them make another queen. Surely you couldn't have bad luck twice.

I've made several NUcs this spring from my best hive and intend on requeening 4 of my mean hives this summer with those nuc queens. I hope to get it done in time to let each of the nucs requeening themselves so that I can overwinter the nucs on top of existing hives with a screen board in between.

[Wally]

I would check the added frames for queen cells after 3 to 4 days. If there are no queen cells, it is likely because your new queen is there, but not laying. If there are queen cells, you will want to remove them all before adding a purchased queen. They will not accept her if they have queen cells.