Top 4 photos: hives at a local beekeeper, where we visited today with our beekeeping association. One of the things they showed was how to split a hive into two new colonies, also known as performing an artificial swarm. This beekeeper used wooden hives. The individual boxes are very heavy to lift, particularly when they contain honey. I’m glad we’ve gone for the much lighter styrofoam boxes.

Bottom 5 photos: As soon as we came home, we split our healthy hive into two. Now we have three colonies! The A-hive is already capping some of the honey cells (this means the honey has passed the quality control test by the bees, it’s now the right consistency for long term storage from their point of view – and we could extract it quite soon).

13 June 2015

Today we first went to meet a group of beekeepers from our local beekeeping association. Some have been keeping bees for 30 years, some are beginners like us and then everything in between. As luck would have it, the group met today to explain how to split a healthy hive into two, a technique often used to prevent a swarm.

But first a really good tip from an experienced beekeeper: take off any rings when you work with bees. If you get stung, a finger might swell up very quickly and then you’d have to get the ring cut off by a doctor.

We’ve read about lots of different ways to split a hive into two in order to prevent swarming. What you are basically trying to achieve is for the queen to think she has swarmed to a new place which is the natural way for a hive to behave.

The method we went for was to move the queen plus 2 boxes of brood to a different spot (in our case, in between the two other hives). In the original spot, we put a new box with empty frames but we took some frames with brood from the hive we just moved. The idea is that the bees in the new position will fly back to their old position and will start raising a new queen. The theory is that they are more loyal to their location than to the queen. We put the 2 honey boxes back on top of the new box, ie in the old position. On the last photo above, the artificial swarm is in the middle (2 broodboxes with the queen). The new colony is on the right, with the 2 honeyboxes on top.

We also moved a couple of frames of brood from the other hives to the weak B-hive. Now that the weather is better, they are in a better position to raise a new queen, so we also decided to remove the queen that is in there, as she was never mated (the weather was too cold) and she is not laying any eggs.

So the situation is that we have

one hive with a very healthy and active queen (the new C-hive)

one hive that’s never had a working queen (the B-hive) but we’ve kept ticking over with brood frames from the other hive until the weather was good enough for them to raise a queen which has a chance of being mated

a newly created colony (which will continue to call the A-hive as it’s in the same spot) with 2 honey boxes on top that also needs to raise a new queen pretty quickly.

It takes 16 days for the worker bees to raise a queen from brood – they will feed the cell they have chosen to become a queen with royal jelly. If she then mates in the first week after hatching, the first new worker bees with hatch 3 weeks after that. So we are looking at a minimum of 6 weeks to see new brood from new queens.

Tomorrow, we need to do another varroa treatment, as we still have too many mites in the hives. We cut a comb from the drone frame again, full of drone larvae and varroa mites. Yum yum thank you, say the magpies.

One of the most intringuing things about beekeeping is that there are at least five different answers to a question. The method we used today to split the hive is one of many, but one that made sense to us. However, here is a video of an English beekeeper explaining a method (using miniature, empty boxes) which is exactly the opposite of what we did today.

http://www.somersetbeekeepers.org.uk/art_swarm.html

Enjoy!