Laurence Edwards shows how to split a hive in early May using two capped brood frames, which prevents swarming and lets the original colony focus on honey production. By June both the new nuc and original hive are strong; repeat annually and consolidate weaker colonies at year's end to scale your apiary without losing the honey crop.
Ow! There is nothing worse than coming down to inspect your bees and realizing that your bees have swarmed. Cap queen cells, half the amount of bees, your colony's pretty much done for the year and you are not going to get much honey. The race is then on to try and recover your colony, to get them up to strength, to get them through the winter. I'm going to cover that in a separate video, but what I'm going to do in this video is I'm going to show you a really simple technique that not only reduces the chances of your bees Swarming, but it also ensures that you're going to have a good amount of honey going into the summer and you're going to make a split and you're going to get some money out of it as well. This is by far and away my favorite technique for making increase, but also reducing the chances of swarming. Now, if you've only got one beehive and you think, I only want to keep one beehive, I don't want to make splits, do not worry. You can combine these colonies back up at the end of the season, or you can just sell the split. Once you've built up that split, you put a new queen in there, you've got it building up, you've got it in brood in all stages, 3 or 4 frames in that nuc. You can sell that nuc and probably recoup the cost that you paid for your original nuc starting out. What's so important though is doing this at the right time of the year. You need to do it preemptively, you don't wanna do it reactively. So don't wait until you've found swarm cells to do it because the chances are if you do this manipulation, this split, once you've found swarm cells, the colony can still swarm. So I'll jump straight into it then. Simple technique, making a 2-frame split. All you're gonna do is go into your colony when you've got a full Full brood box, and you're gonna take out 2 frames of brood. On those 2 frames, you want them as capped as possible, preferably with emerging brood. Make sure the queen is on one of those frames as well. Take those 2 frames, pop them into a nuc, add a frame of stores, shake off a couple of brood frames worth of bees into that nuc as well, fill it up with 3 frames of foundation, put the lid on, close the disc, take it off to another apiary site, or you can do this in the same apiary if you want. I'll put the link for that video in the description, but I do recommend taking it 3 miles away to another apiary. And it is as simple as that. You've made yourself a 2-frame split. Now what you're going to be left behind with there is the vast majority of those bees. Now if you want to, you can do this as a walkaway split and just leave the bees completely to it. They will form a new queen and you don't have to worry about going back down and taking down any amount of cells there. With a walkaway split, they don't seem to throw out any sort of swarm or any sort of cast swarm as well. So you can just do that manipulation there and just leave the bees to it. Come back 5 weeks later and fingers crossed you'll have a mated queen, she'll be laying again, you'll have brood in all stages, and hopefully at the same point you'll have quite a decent amount of honey. Now the benefit of not adding in a mated queen there is that if you do this manipulation at the beginning of May, as you're moving into the swarm season before they've produced any swarm cells, then that 5 weeks should take you through until the beginning, say middle of June. It should get you through to the June gap. Now the bees tend to not swarm around the June gap, at least mine don't here. They kind of know that something's going on. They tend to go before it or they tend to go after it. But the beauty of this manipulation here, doing it at that time, is that you're cutting out the really dangerous point in the season, which for us is say the last week of April to the first week of June, those 6 weeks. Now you've taken the queen out and you have completely restricted the chance of that colony swarming. But the double benefit that you get at that point as well is that because there's gonna be no eggs and larvae in that colony, all of the bees are able to go out and forage honey. You tend to get a really, really good crop of honey, even though you've taken the queen out and even though you've taken a couple of frames of brood out. So let's fast forward a little bit, back end of June, your colony should be back up to full strength by now, and you've also got a full strength nuc. Now you can take that nuc at that point, once it's full up over 6 frames, you can put it in a hive, and that way you've turned your one hive into 2 hives, and you've got your colony through the worst part of the year without them swarming. Now, if you do this every year, you go from 1 hive to 2 hives to 4 hives to 8 hives, it gets really out of control very, very quickly. So if you don't want to do that, what you can do is you can just say at the end of the year, right, which one of those colonies has got the most honey? Which one is the most disease-free? Which one looks the most healthiest? Which one is the calmest? Just choose which one you want, kill the queen in the other one, And just do like a newspaper combine to take them back together again. That method of management is very, very powerful because it gives you options and it keeps all of your bees together. It means you don't lose any swarms, means that you can sell your nucs if you want to, and most importantly for me, it means you don't lose any honey in the process as well. I hope you found that video useful. If you enjoyed it, please hit the like button and subscribe to the channel.
