Live From the Hive

Back in THIS POST we discussed our attempts to make splits.  We explained that we currently have four hives and how you can make splits from existing hives to expand your colonies of bees.  We attempted to split into a deep box and also a small nuc box that I made.  Well, it's been almost a month ago and today was the day we had marked on our calendars to check to see if the splits were successful.

When we pull the top off, we'll be looking real quickly to see if we can see a queen or eggs or larvae.  If we see any of the above, we have a laying queen and will have expanded our boxes from four to six.  If we don't see any of the above, we'll restack the boxes on top of where they came from.  Tricia and I put our bee suits on and headed out to the hives.  Lots of activity from all of the boxes - bees coming in and out.  Bees carrying pollen going in.  That's a good sign!

Using the smoker to calm them down, we opened up the deep box.  Here's the moment of truth!  It's windy today, so I'm going to be looking real fast.  I don't want our new queen, if we have one, to fly off.  Once I see the queen, eggs or larvae, I'm closing it up as we will know the split was successful.

There's a pretty decent amount of bees on the first frame and the cells are heavy and full of nectar.

We didn't see the queen; however, if you look at the very center of the frame below and to the right, you'll see white larvae in some of the cells that look like the letter "c".  There are also a few capped brood cells.  Even though we saw no queen, the larvae and capped brood evidence the fact we have a laying queen.  It's a successful split!

Let's check out the split in the nuc.  Only five frames in here, but there was a pretty decent population of bees in it.

A quick look.  This frame has nectar in it.  You can see the reflection in the bottom of the photo below:

I do a quick scan on one side and flip it over to see the opposite side.

As in the other box, we were unable to find the queen, but if you look in the very center of the photo below and to the right, you'll see larvae!

Another successful split!  We added a queen excluder and then put a medium box on top.  That will keep the queen out of the honey supers.  I moved the brick from crossways to straight.  That's my note to tell me that we have a laying queen in this box.  In the photo at the very top, you'll see that the bricks in the split hives BEFORE we checked them today had the bricks crossways.

We started with four hives - now we have six!  There's a story to the box on the far right with the top cracked.  Why is the top cracked?  That split hive was the one that was in the nuc.  The nuc was a homemade box made with 1x12 lumber.  It wasn't exactly square, so the lid didn't seal perfectly.  The bees in the nuc never used the front door.  They would go in and out through the gap between the top and the nuc.

When we moved the frames from the nuc to a deep box so they'd have room to grow, bees coming in from foraging couldn't figure out how to get in the box.  They were congregating at the corner where the nuc had a crack for going in and out.  What to do!  I've got to get the bees back in the box!  I had an idea!  I'll crack the telescoping top.  It worked!  The bees coming in went right in the box.  Bees don't fly at night, so after dark when all the bees were safely at home, I went out and closed the top.  Tomorrow morning when they go out the front door, they'll recalibrate and find their way back home.

From four hives to six

What good news!  We expanded our hives by two boxes.  It's important to do this as it is not uncommon to lose a hive or two every year for one reason or another.  Making splits and/or catching wild swarms is a good way to "insure" your beekeeping operation. Should you lose a box or two to wax moths, varroa mites, small hive beetles, or any other reason, you've added a couple boxes by making splits.

Attempting to Make Splits

We've got big plans for our four honeybee hives.  Here it is April 16th and we're almost out of honey.  We pulled honey in July and again in the fall and our inventory is low.  I think we'll run out before we rob the hives.  So we got to thinking that we need a few more hives. If we had 6 hives instead of four, that would be perfect.

I do have swarm traps out to try to catch some wild swarms, but so far, no luck.  The other option is to make splits.  That's exactly what we did.  You'll notice the splits below.  Moving left to right, the third box and the last box are splits.  The splits come off of the existing four hives, and I'll try to explain what we did.

A quick description of making a split is as follows:  You get an empty box.  Then you open a healthy hive of bees with a strong population.  As you go through each frame in the brood chamber, you want to locate the queen.  On frames where the queen is NOT there, remove a frame of honey, a frame of pollen, a frame of eggs, a frame of uncapped and capped larva and put it in the empty box.  We attempted a split into a deep box and another split in the Nuc.

Within five hours, the nurse bees in the split hives realize that there is NO queen in the box by the lack of the scent of her pheromone.  That spells doom for a colony of bees, so they pick out a cell for the bee in which they'll make a queen.  To accomplish this, the nurse bees begin feeding it nothing but royal jelly that they produce from a gland in their heads.  I'll show a projected timeline below:

We made splits on April 6th, 

On April 9th the bees select the larvae that will become the queen cells
On April 11th, they cap the queen cells

On April 19th the queen hatches and leaves her cell
From April 22-April 26, the virgin queen takes orientation flights
From April 24-May 3 the queen takes her mating flight where she flies to meet a drone to get bred.
On April 26-May 3 you'll see your first eggs if mating was successful
By May 12, you'll want to investigate to ensure they've been successful in creating a new queen.

Here is the split hive that we put in a regular deep box:

And here's one that we put in a nuc.:

If the splits were successful, we should see a queen in the split hives as well as eggs by May 12.  We use bricks positioned on the top cover to tell the story about what's going on in the hive.  A brick laid longways tells us that we either saw the queen or we saw eggs.  A brick laid crossways, like the third and last hives tells you that no queen was located and no eggs were located.

If the splits were successful, we'll know about it and will be able to move the bricks on the 3rd and 6th hives longways.  We certainly hope we're successful in splitting and moving from four to six hives of honeybees.

Making Splits

We've never done this before on our own.  As relatively new beekeepers we've made our share of mistakes, and we're certain to make more.  We decided to make our own 'walk-away splits' this spring.  A split is where you take a colony of bees, split it, and make two colonies of bees.  It's like compound interest.

Of our four hives we had at the end of last year, we have two left.  One was lost due to wax moths.  The second is a mystery.  Perhaps the queen died?  Perhaps they were a little weak and the cold weather did them in?  Whatever happened, we are told it is a common occurrence.  "If you want a beehive, get two," they say.  Some people lose all their hives, but they catch more swarms and resume.  

Tricia and I put on our suits and unstacked one of the hives we lost.  Here she is cleaning the bottom board.  She'll put that back down as it will serve as the base for one of our splits.

The two remaining hives appeared to be very healthy, and that is a must in order to make splits.  You'll note that we have two deeps with a queen excluder and then medium supers on top.  To make a walkaway split, you simply move one of the deeps and put on top of a bottom board and you're done.  But there's a few things you need to check before doing that.

Despite not feeding our bees, they have plenty of stores of honey in the supers.  This is money in the bank.  Spring has arrived and the bees are bringing in nectar and pollen and will have lots of honey to spare when we pull honey in the summertime!

Capped honey in the supers

Then we got down into the deep boxes.  We used our smoker to calm the bees.  One hive is naturally calm.  The other hive is aggressive and get up in your face.  The first thing you want to see is drones or at least capped drone cells.  The drones are the males and you need males so that when a new queen is made, there will be drones in the area (from your colonies or another) for the virgin queen to mate with.  We went through the boxes and found capped drones.  Good news.  The drone cells are laid on the bottom as their cells are larger and don't fit in the regular foundation.

Now we look for the queen.  In the frame below we found eggs, larvae, and capped brood.  All letting us know that we have a laying queen somewhere.  We flipped the frame over and found her!  Her tail is longer than the others.  She's a little difficult to see, but once you get the hang of it, she kind of stands out.  Good.  So that box with the queen gets moved to a new location.  This is done to fool her into thinking she's swarmed.  That's what we're told, so we did it.

Nurse bees and eggs

The other box must be gone through frame by frame.  The boxes must have at least 3 or 4 frames of eggs and brood and these are positioned in the middle, and then several frames of honey and pollen and drawn comb on the outside.  As long as you have this in both boxes, you should be good.    The box with the queen will continue going as normal (but with half the bees).  Not to worry.  She's laying eggs like crazy and the hive will grow exponentially in size.

The box with no queen...  Well, what happens next is simply amazing.  The bees in the queen-less box will realize there is no queen in about 5 hours.  They will begin to feed royal jelly from a gland in their heads to some larvae and these will make queen cells.  In about 16 days a queen will emerge.  She will get her wits about her and will make her maiden breeding flight where she will fly up to the drone zone and get bred.  She'll return to the hive and begin to lay.

So in the photo below, you'll see that we made two splits.  The bricks on top of the hives denote what's in them.  The bricks laying long-ways (the first and third hives) have a laying queen.  The hives where the bricks are laying cross-ways (the second and fourth hives) have no queen.  We will check both of those boxes in about 3 1/2 weeks to a month.  What we're looking for is eggs.  If we find eggs, we will know that the split was successful.  

You can buy a queen cell and speed up this process, but we opted to let the hive do it themselves.  You lose a little time, but that's okay with us.  Now, we wait...

What happens if the split didn't work?  Well, we'll be disappointed, but we'll stack the boxes on top of the existing healthy hives and we will try to make another split OR we'll try to catch wild swarms in the yard.  We actually got called to go get a swarm in someone's yard last Saturday, but we had company over.  When the company left, we put on our suits and started to go, but the swarm had left!  Oh well.  We'll keep you posted with our first attempt of making splits.

Getting Ready to Make Splits

In a month or two it will be time to make splits.  I'm talking beekeeping now.  Making splits involves taking one box of bees and making two.  It sounds like voodoo, but it's not.  I'm just a novice beekeeper, but I'll try to explain.  We're going to make what's called "walkaway splits."  You can do this if you have two deep boxes.  If you do, you simply take one of your deeps and put it on top of a bottom board.  

You don't even have to find the queen.  You just may want to check and make sure you have eggs, brood, and nectar/honey/pollen in each deep.  In whatever deep box that does NOT have the queen, the worker bees become aware that there is not a queen in only 5 hours.  The workers will begin feeding royal jelly to a couple of the larvae and they will become the new queen.  The walkaway split that has the queen will go on as normal.

This 'bee math' allows you to turn 1 hive of bees into 2.  If you are successful, you will realize a number of benefits.  Ideally you'll make more honey.  You'll also have more boxes of bees that you can sell, if you wish.  You'll realize increased pollination and thus, increased yields in your garden and crops.

I have enough boxes to make splits, I think, but I need more bottom boards.  You Tube is great for learning to do new things, even for an unskilled carpenter like myself.  It didn't even cost a penny.  I had some 1 x 12 lumber up in the hay loft that was leftover from another project, and I cut it up and was able to make 2 bottom boards.  The bee boxes fit right on top, hence the name bottom board.

From this angle you can see the little landing strip on the left hand side that they will fly into.

I found an old rusty can of primer that I primed the project with.  I want to do this right so that the bottom boards last as they'll be out in the weather and closest to the ground.  I put two coats of primer, just to be safe.

Finally, I put two coats of exterior paint on the bottom boards.  I'll let it dry for a couple of days and then I'll store them out of the weather for the day this spring where we'll make splits.

Now, I think I'll search for some plans to make telescoping bee hive cover.  They are $30 a piece if you purchase them, but I think I can make them for nothing other than my time.  Then we'll be ready for making splits.

Putting Together Frames For the Bees

Here's a look at one of the two bee hives that we have on the property.  It's been about a year since we caught two swarms - one in Jefferson Davis Parish and one out at the farm in Allen Parish.  I took this video, but wish I would've gotten film of the bees' activity today.  The video below is really tame compared to all the bees this afternoon.

We plan on expanding in the bee business this year.  We'd like to put out some additional swarm traps to see if we could be successful in catching more that way.  Primarily, though, we'd like to expand by making splits.  If your hive is healthy enough, you can make a split by taking a frame of eggs/larvae, a frame of honey and pollen and plenty of nurse bees from the existing hive and placing them in the center of another box surrounded by frames.

What happens is remarkable.  The bees immediately know that there is no queen.  They begin "making" a queen.  (You can also purchase a queen cell to speed things up.)  The queen will hatch, make her virgin flight, be bred by drones and return to the "new" box and begin laying eggs.  This will be a first for us.  We'll see if we're successful.

First, we need more equipment:  boxes, frames, bottom boards and tops.  Russ has a friend in a nearby town that had some new frames for sale.  We drove over last weekend and picked them up.  They came in pieces, requiring assembly.

I got some wood glue and put the frames together.  Once the glue had dried, Tricia began popping the foundation in place.  The foundation is coated with beeswax.

In a jiffy we had the 20 deep frames put together.  On Thursday afternoon, we'll head to Lacassine to purchase some boxes, bottom boards, and tops from a gentleman in our beekeeping club.  Then we'll be ready to go - either put up swarm traps OR make splits.  Our beekeeping club will be making splits in early March, so we'll try to glean as much knowledge as we can.