Also, have a second set of woodenware ready for the split. In order to continue with the split, you should have found the queen, see healthy brood patterns and some stored honey and pollen, and have determined that your bees are free from disease. While easy, this is not the ideal type of split if you plan to Step 1: Determine that your bees are healthy and have come out of winter successfully. Only conduct the literal split method on very healthy and strong mother hives. Note: This method significantly reduces the population in the mother hive. It allows the bees to make their own queen and the queen to mate with drones in the area. This method works well if you have a very large apiary or many hives to split or are short on time. Because it doesn’t require an inspection prior to the split, the existing queen might remain in the mother hive or end up in the new hive.įollow-up inspections are critical to ensure both colonies grow strong and healthy and to make sure each hive has a mated queen. In essence, this method splits the mother hive in half. This simple way of splitting a bee colony requires minimal manipulation of frames but a lot of faith in the bees’ ability to create a new queen. (Nothing is guaranteed in beekeeping!) Here are two of my favorite tried-and-true ways to go about it. No two beekeepers do it the same, and no two splits create the same result. With as many styles of beekeeping as there are beekeepers, there is no one way to “split” a hive of bees. While some rural beekeepers might allow their colonies to grow and swarm, splitting hives is one of the most important preventative measures a responsible urban apiarist can take. Why split? For better or worse, urban beekeepers have a unique responsibility to their neighbors, fellow beekeepers and city to do their best to keep their bees from swarming. While splitting is a hands-on job, requiring some manipulation of the hives, the beekeeper and the bees are better for it if done correctly and on time. By manipulating their environment through splitting, this urge is reduced and, to top it off, the beekeeper ends up with a new colony of bees. Each spring, a colony’s population reaches maximum capacity and the bees’ natural urge is to swarm, making space in the hive and sending out a new colony. Making a split creates two colonies from one, just as swarming does. Splitting a hive is a beekeeper’s way of managing hive populations, controlling the colony’s swarm tendencies and creating new colonies, all in one action. Ever wonder how your local bee supplier created the nucleus colony you bought your first beekeeping spring? Or how beekeepers expand their apiaries without buying bees year after year? Honeybees’ natural means of propagation is through swarming, but in our own beeyards, the easiest way to create more colonies is by what’s called making a split of an existing hive.
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