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.