Do Not Split Your Beehives Too Early – When Spring Splits Are Actually Safe

In this video, I'm going to talk to you about the earliest possible time to make splits in the UK. So when it comes to making splits, you do need to think about a few different factors that are coming into play. First thing you need to think about is, are you going to try and make like a walkaway split? That is just taking half of the colony, putting it off somewhere else, letting them draw out their own emergency cells, and then trying to get a queen mated from one of those emergency cells. Or are you going down the route of making splits by adding in mated queen? This is a really important consideration, and it's something that you need to think about at the very beginning before you even come to the point of actually making a split on your beehive. So I will deal with both of those different scenarios in this video today. First one I'm going to talk about is making a split with a mated queen, because when it comes to making a split with a mated queen, there's only really one thing that you need to take into account, and that is the availability of mated queens. So if you're going down the route of getting a mated imported queen, F1 Buckfast, you're probably talking around mid to late April is when your queen is going to actually be available for you to put it in the colony. You need to rewind back through the process, and generally you're going to be looking to put that queen into the colony around day 8 or day 9 of actually making the split. But before you actually get to that point, you need to assess what is a suitable strength for a colony to be making a split at that time of the year. My advice is always Just kind of give it a couple of extra weeks. Don't try and do it as early as possible. You will reward yourself by letting it go just an extra couple of weeks to let those colonies get to a suitable size strength before you start splitting them. If you start taking a colony that's over, say, 4 or 5 frames, and you think, right, I can split this off into 3 colonies and I'll give them 1 frame of bees each and I'll add a mated queen and everything will be fine— can't do that in the middle of April. Because the nighttime temperature is really not very high still, and you're going to set the bees back so much. So if you're looking to push it as far as you possibly can, as early as you can into the year, first thing I would say is all you should really be doing is a simple split in terms of taking one colony, turning it into 2 colonies. I wouldn't push it any further than that. I wouldn't take one colony and split it into 3 colonies. Keep it simple, one colony into 2. If you're going down the route of a mated queen, to take into account when that queen's going to arrive and then ideally make the split 8 to 9 days before that queen arrives. I'll stick some links at the end of this video to show you kind of the different processes for actually making the splits, but in summary, you make a split, you wait 8 days, you go into the split that's not got the queen in it, you knock down all of the queen cells, and at that point you put the queen in her cage into the colony, give it 48 hours with her sealed up, And then you pop the tab and then you leave it a week. That's my process. Really good process. Always works. So answering the question, how early can you make that split? I would suggest you're safe to make that split as long as you've got your queen confirmed for a very specific date towards the middle to back end of April. The prerequisite that I would say though is that your colony needs to be absolutely jam-packed full of bees and brood. That's the important word there— brood. Don't want to be doing this on a colony that's not kicked into spring expansion yet. So I would suggest, as long as your colony is covering all of the frames in a brood box and you're on about 70 or 80% of those frames that are actually brood— so in my boxes I've got 10 frames. If I say, right, those 10 frames are completely full to the brim with bees and I've got 7 or 8 frames of brood in there, I've got availability of mated queens coming into the season, and we're around the middle to the back end of April, you can safely go ahead and make a split. And the only caveat that I would add on to that is that when you do make these splits, give them some form of supplemental feeding. Don't just leave them to it because they can really starve quite quickly, especially if you're splitting the brood around unevenly. So make the splits middle to back end of April, add your mated queen in there, monitor them, make sure you're feeding them up really, really well, And that should be a safe time, an early time to do a split within the UK. The other variant that we've spoken about here is doing some form of walkaway split. Now, I don't like walkaway splits. I never have liked them. Just cause quite a lot of issues in my view. What you need to work out there is that when is there going to be availability of mature, sexually mature drones that those queens can go out and actually mate with? So the sign that you're looking for in your colony, the first sign that you're going to look for is the same as the other one. You want a big, strong colony covering all of the frames in the brood box, 70 to 80% of brood, but you also want to see capped drone brood within that colony. As soon as you're seeing a significant portion of capped drone brood within that colony, you need to fast forward at least 2 weeks to say, right, that drone brood is going to emerge roughly in about 2, 2 and a half weeks, and then you need to wait another, say, 7 to 10 days to allow those drones to become sexually mature. So if you want a nice easy number to remember, you want to take the point where you find a big section of drone brood, add 4 weeks onto that, and that's going to give you the date when the drones are sexually mature, able to fly if the weather's good, and able to actually mate with your virgin queens. What you then need to do is actually work back, because the date that you've just got there is the date when the virgins are going to be able to go out and successfully fly and mate with sexually mature drones. So you need to work back to find out when you make your split, when are you likely to have a virgin actually going to be flying. So my rule of thumb, if I'm doing any kind of work like that, is that as soon as you see a big patch of drone brood, if you add 2 weeks onto that and then make your split, you're going to be in a really good position when that queen actually comes out and goes to mate. You're going to be about 1 or 2 weeks into the period when you're going to have sexually mature drones flying. I always like to bake in a little bit of contingency on that. You could take it where you only add one week after you see a big patch of drone brood, but I just think give it an extra week. You're going to get better temperatures, higher chances of flying. But come on, this is the UK, it never works like that anyway. And sod's law, you'll always find that the week that you've earmarked for really good flying weather and all of your virgins are going out flying, it's like 6 degrees and just raining all week anyway. So it doesn't make a massive difference. That's my rule of thumb though. So as soon as you see that big patch of drone brood, add 2 weeks, then you can make your walkaway split. Let them rear a natural emergency queen, and then you're safe in the knowledge that when that queen's going out for her mating flight, there's going to be available sexually mature drones for her to mate with. If you want me to commit to a date, a safe date to do it in the UK, and it will be very different from whether you're in the north of Scotland down to the south of England, but I would say the last week of April and the first week of May. Somewhere around there, if you're going to do a walkaway split, that has got plenty of contingency baked in, but that is a safe time to do a walkaway split, and that's the earliest time that I would do a split if I wasn't using a mated queen. The final option there, one that I've not spoken about before, and it's the most natural option when it comes to actually doing a split, is wait for the bees to tell you when it's the right time. They will tell you as clear as you like, and it's the reason that we go in every single week and do our beekeeping They will be trying to swarm. They'll have tons of space in the brood box, they'll have loads of space up in the supers, but the bees are saying, this is the time, we're gonna swarm. If you go into your apiary and there's a couple of colonies trying to swarm and the weather's good, you know you've hit the point in the season where you can safely make walkaway splits or splits of any type. If you want to see some of my methods for splitting beehives, check out this video here which shows you the easiest method for making a split.