Many ways to lose a colony
There are all kinds of ways to lose a single colony, and if a person’s goal were to have their whole apiary die, they would have many options. Of course, I don’t know of anyone with this goal, but today I am going to share with you how I almost lost my whole apiary from a combination of two mistakes.
Splitting too fast- Greed
After my first year owning my own hive, and my second year keeping bees, I decided I wanted to keep bees commercially. I was 16 at the time, and wanted to run 1,000 colonies by the time I turned 18. Oh the dreams of kids that age. Well, I wanted to take a truckload of bees to the almonds. And there was only one major problem with my plan. I had one colony, and basically no money to speak of. I had already used what money I did have for woodenware. So, I decided to split my one hive.
It was a very big, productive hive, and the year before, it had a three deep brood box. Well, the following year, 2016, I decided to split it. I needed to grow my apiary extremely quickly if I were to be a commercial beekeeper by the time I turned 18. Looking back, it seems silly how unreasonable this goal was, given my financial state, and the fact that I had a grand total of one colony. But I was determined.
I began by splitting my one hive into four colonies. Now this would have been an ambitious but reasonable goal. (This past year, I split two colonies into ten, with good success.) But I didn’t stop there, and split each colony again, until I had a total of eight colonies. At this point, I was midsummer, with two frame colonies. Each one had a queen, but it was too late in the year for the bees to build up enough for me to overwinter them.
The second mistake-Stubornness
I proudly told others of my plans. My dad, who had done far more research into beekeeping than my 16 year old self ever even thought to do, told me he didn’t think it would work. He thought I should recombine some hives. I could have done this, and probably come through with five or six reasonably sized hives. A neighbor, who is a good friend of our family’s, and had kept bees, also told me that he thought there was no way that splitting one hive into eight was a good idea, given the time of year, and our climate. But at this point, not only had I already made the mistake, I was too stubborn to fix it. I wanted to prove that it could be done, and I wanted to be the one to do it.
I kept trying to get the bees to build up, but there is something very important in beekeeping, called critical mass. Critical mass basically means the minimum number of bees to accomplish hive activities successfully. Any bees beyond critical mass dramatically improve the outcomes. A hive that does not have enough bees for critical mass can stay at two frames all season, just struggling to keep the small amount of brood from getting chilled and gathering enough nectar and pollen to keep the bees fed. Most of those hives never got to critical mass, where they could really start to take off.
Fall and winter came, and somewhere in that timeframe, all but three or four of my colonies died. They just didn’t have the resources to survive, or the critical mass to cluster and stay warm. I would have been far better to combine some of the weakest of the colonies, and then split them again come spring, in a more sustainable manner.
Splitting your hives- what is reasonable
How much you can actually expect to split is dependent on many factors. If you are doing a walk away split, this takes time for the queen to be raised, and the number of bees will continue to decline until brood begins emerging. With a walk away split, you could safely and conservatively split eight frames into two colonies, if this occurs before mid May (where I am at, in eastern Washington).
If you have queens you can introduce, you can safely get more splits out of a colony. At the same time frame, you could likely conservatively split one colony into two.
Another option, if you have five or more healthy hives, is to take one frame from each colony, and do this once every week or two, to make another split. If you have a queen or queen cell to give them, you can take three frames per nuc, or if they must raise their own queen, then you should give them five frames, or at least four.
What I learned
As much as it can be tempting to grow your apiary really quickly, and split the hives you currently have really heavily, it is worth the wait. In the long run, what matters is not how many hives you have in the spring, summer, or fall, but how many make it out of winter. In the long run, splitting hives judiciously is more effective for expanding your apiary, than to split really hard, and to not have most of the splits make it through winter.
Want to know exactly how to split? Check out this simple way to make splits, and this even easier method.