You don’t have to know how to graft
If you are anything like me, the idea of splitting your hives is enough to make you giddy. It can be so addicting. I decided just this weekend, that I have to force myself to stop making splits. I don’t have enough equipment for them the way it is, and I need to get the ones I’ve made built up.
But unless you’re proficient with grafting, splitting your hives can create a bit of a problem. Of course you can just let the bees raise their own queen, with an emergency cell, but this is not very efficient, especially if you want to make multiple splits at a time.
In this blog post, I will walk you through how I make my splits. I’ve found this method to be very successful, and allows the bees to not have quite the same “crash” or “die-off” they experience when they have to raise their own queen.
The nuts and bolts
Let’s say I have either two full hives, or several smaller hives, totaling about 20 or more frames of resources.
I’ll begin, by choosing about seven frames, and adding them to a new hive. I want young bees, not so much the field force, so I am taking the frames of brood from the colony that has the best queen. Maybe she is very productive, maybe she is very gentle, or maybe she consistently makes it through the winter. Whatever my reason, she is my favorite queen. I want to take frames that have eggs, and very young larva. I take maybe three or four really good frames of brood. Then from my other colony, I take frames of pollen and honey. I want to make sure that I don’t take any eggs or open brood from this colony, unless I would be alright with queens raised from her genetics as well.
I will then combine these bees, into the new hive. The worker bees will fly back to their old hive, and the nurse bees will stay. You want to make sure there is a really good force of bees to feed and cover the new queens they will be making. Before nightfall, crack the lid and check to see if there are enough bees to cover the frames of brood, and if not, add some more bees. To do this, open the hive with the greater force of bees and inspect brood frames. Find the frames with no queen on them, then shake these nurse bees into the new box. Because nurse bees haven’t flown yet, they will stay in the new hive.
Repeat this process the next morning, just checking to make sure there are plenty of bees in the new hive. If necessary, shake more bees into the new hive. Most times, this isn’t necessarily.
You can feed the bees during this time if there is not a good nectar flow on. Besides this, just watch to ensure a good healthy amount of traffic from the new hive. In four to six days, you can open the hive, and check to see if there are queen cells. A healthy hive will produce multiple queen cells. Count how many cells are on different frames. Do you have seven cells on one frame, three on another, and one on the third frame? Then you can make three splits, using this method. You only count the cells on different frames. This is the number of nucs you can soon make.
Time to make the nucs
About ten days from when you created the new hive (cell builder), you will want to make up the same number of nucs to cells you have on separate frames. Leave one frame with a queen cell in the cell builder, but put the rest of the frames with queen cells each in their own nuc box. Add honey frames and brood frames (I like to get one frame with capped/emerging brood, and one with eggs and larvae if I can help it. This way there is less of a population crash as the old bees die off.) The number of bees needed in each nuc really depends on how cold it is.
The new queens will quickly emerge and then most often, I have a laying queen two weeks from when I made up the nucs.
Want a faster way to make splits? Check out this post: https://agirlandherbees.com/an-even-simpler-way-to-make-splits/
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