TO SPLIT OR NOT TO SPLIT...
Hive No. 4
Last week I did quite a lot of work up at the apiary - not intentionally - I went up to do a normal hive inspection and as is often the case with the honeybees, they do their own thing. This week their thing happened to be
Hive No. 1 - had swarm cells so I had to do an artificial swarm.
Hive No. 2 - all was well.
Hive No. 3 - had made a supersedure cell.
Hive No. 4 - a very prolific queen laying from corner to corner of the frame in an overcrowded hive leaving not much room left for anything else!
So, what should have been a peek inside to ensure all was well was a good couple of hours sorting things out.
©The honeybee suit
Let’s start with Hive No. 1.
Why did I have to do an artificial swarm? Because there were swarm cells on quite a few frames.
What’s are swarm cells? They are cells containing potential new queens. They normally hang around the edges of a frame and the workers make lots of them!
Why would the workers create them? In simple terms there’s no room left in the hive. The existing queen and half the hive prepare to leave in order to start afresh. The workers prepare lots of queen cells, which contain the queen’s eventual successor which in turn hopefully ensures the survival of the colony left behind.
Whats an artificial swarm? It’s when a beekeeper tricks the bees into thinking they have swarmed.
How is this done? Pay attention and I will make this as simple as possible: You’ve found queen cells in your hive so you…
Move the old hive to a new position in the apiary.
Put a new hive with new frames, some with pulled comb if you have any, in the place where the old hive was.
Remove about 4 of the new frames from the middle new hive.
Go to the old hive and find the frame with the queen on and put it in the middle of the new hive. (I always put a cloth cover over the top of the frames to stop the queen flying out).
Go back to the old hive and find
• a frame with eggs and covered brood.
• a frame with stores and pollen.
• a frame with lots of nurse bees on.
Take them over and put them in the new hive with the queen.
Put a crown board on top with an empty super, a feeder (containing sugar syrup), another crown board and roof.
THE FLYING BEES WILL RETURN TO THIS HIVE AS IT’S WHERE THEIR OLD HIVE WAS AND HAS THE OLD QUEEN IN IT AND, BECAUSE IT HAS LOTS OF NEW FOUNDATION AND SPACE, THEY WILL THINK THEY’VE SWARMED.
Now go over to the old hive which is in it’s new place. Go through it really carefully. Select the frame with the healthiest looking queen cell on it, this will normally be the one the bees are making the most fuss over. Mark the frame with a drawing pin. Then go through the hive and take out ALL the other queen cells except the one you have chosen.
Replace the frames you have taken out with new frames but put them at the front and the back of the hive NOT in the middle.
Put the hive back together, with the supers containing the stored nectar… no need to feed.
LEAVE THIS HIVE ALONE FOR THE NEXT TWO/THREE WEEKS UNTIL THE NEW QUEEN HAS EMERGED.
When you do go to check that this has worked and they have a new queen, don’t mark her until she is mated. You can easily tell the difference between a mated queen and one that hasn’t mated because the one who has mated is much bigger. The reason for this is; you don’t want to damage the new queen in any way that would prevent her from going on her nuptial flight/s.
Hive No. 2
Nothing to report… all was quiet!
Hive No. 3
Supersedure cell found.
What is a supersedure cell? It’s a single queen cell, sometimes 2 that is found in the centre of the frame. (These are sometimes called emergency cells as well).
What does it mean? It means the old queen has died, or the bees aren’t happy with their existing queen because she is not laying properly or perhaps she’s damaged in some way and they need to replace her.
What should you do? Nothing… let the bees sort this out for themselves. The new queen will kill the old queen. Sometimes they can live together until the new queen has mated and then she is killed. Ahhh the harshness of nature.
Hive No. 4
This hive was overcrowded and the queen was laying on each frame from corner to corner. A new beekeeper might be delighted to see such a prolific queen, but to a slightly more experienced beekeeper, this sets alarm bells off, i.e. they will be thinking about swarming. In this case, there weren’t any queen cells to be found, so the bees hadn’t yet decided they were over crowded but I could see it was!
My bees are not in my garden so I cannot keep a close eye on them. I decided, therefore, to split the hive. The video below is me doing this split and I would re-iterate what I say in said video, you only do this sort of a split on a strong colony.
Well there it… another week at the apiary, when four became 6. I should just say that swarm cells in April aren’t very common as most swarms occur on warm sunny days between the months of May and July. However, because of the unpredictable weather the flying bees haven’t been able to get out, the queen has continued lay and the young bees are secreting wax. The result? There’s is nowhere to build new comb so the ratio of young, house bound bees to older foragers is imbalanced which creates congestion in the hive. Hence, when the sun does come out the swarming instinct kicks in. In fact, I was saying to someone today, a fellow beekeeper, “trouble is the honeybees don’t realise they are being kept and monitored, they think they are wild.” This is a good thing… good for them that is… for us it makes life as a beekeeper unpredictable but enormously interesting! “Bee Prepared” should be the motto of beekeepers. If you’re a new beekeeper and you’re off to check your bees, take everything and expect the unexpected!
That’s it for this week. Thank you for being with me. I hope you’re feeling a part of the apiary with my blog now being on a weekly basis. As usual I will leave you with a quote and a couple of rather nice pictures I took while doing all of the above.
“The bee is domesticated but not tamed” – William Longgood -
Have a wonderful week.
