🐝 What Is the Earliest You Can Split a Beehive in Spring?

In this video, I'm going to tell you the earliest possible time that you should be splitting your beehives. So first off, you need to make a decision. Why are you splitting your beehives? Do you want to make massive increase in a single year, or are you just splitting them to stop them swarming and you might have a plan later to recombine? That decision there is going to completely guide when the earliest time you should be splitting your beehives is. So we're going to deal with both of those separately. If you're splitting your single beehive, because you want to avoid your colony swarming throughout the year and you want to go from one colony to 2 colonies and then maybe combine them back at the end of the year or live with 2 colonies. I would suggest in the UK you're looking at doing that around first, second, or third week of May, something like that. I won't give you an exact date because it is going to be dependent on where you are within the country and it's also dependent on a number of other factors as well. But if you're doing it in order to stop the bees swarming, make sure you do it before the swarming season, which for me is kind of like May and a little bit of June as well. That's the prime swarm season over here. That's where you're going to lose the majority of the first swarms that exit big healthy colonies. If you want to err on the side of caution and you want me to commit to a date, go with the 1st of May. Split your colony in 2. Highly likely that either of those splits is going to build up to a point where it warms later on in the season. Not impossible, just highly unlikely. If you get to the end of the season then you can combine those 2 back together and you should still get a reasonable honey crop from both of those colonies of bees if you split them on the 1st of May, build them up and then target that late summer flow anywhere from the 2nd or 3rd week of June onwards and then all the way throughout July. Good simple method for making splits, getting a decent amount of honey and not going wild with the number of colonies of bees that So even though I've given you a fixed date there of the 1st of May, you do need to make sure that your colony is displaying some of these other things as well. If they're on a single brood box, you need to make sure that they are full, nowhere to go, completely bubbling over. You have got a box full of bees. If you're on an 11 or 12 frame box, I would say an absolute minimum of 8 frames of national deep brood. If your bees are completely filling the brood box, you've got 8 frames of brood, you can Go ahead and you can make your split. Don't think, well, it's the 1st of May and my bees are on 6 frames of bees and there's 3 frames of brood, therefore I can make a split. You really do need to make sure that your colonies can take that split and you're giving them sufficient resources. I never like to recommend walkaway splits because I generally find that you end up with one half that just dies due to a poorly mated queen, but that's just my personal opinion. I won't try and plug our own mated queens there. But I'm definitely a fan of adding a mated queen when you're making splits. So let's go back to scenario 1 then. You're looking to make as many possible splits as you can, and you're looking at the absolute earliest time to split your colony of bees. Now again, the same prerequisites apply. You need a box, a brood box full to the brim with bees. Don't do it if the bees are only covering 60, 70, 80% of that brood box. They need to be covering 120% of that box. I know the math doesn't really work, but what I'm trying to say is even when your bees are covering 10 frames, you can cram loads more bees into that box so you get this bubbling effect. If you're on a single brood box, you want it really, really full of bees. And again, the same number of brood frames applies. I would go for a recommended 8 frames of brood before making a split. Now you could probably push that limit and go down to say 6 frames of brood. It's not what I would recommend though, because you're pushing it a little bit too early in the season And it means that you're going to be taking a lot of older winter bees into those splits, which really does stunt their growth. Might seem like a good thing to do, and you might think, well, I'm getting a head start, I'm making the splits early, they're going to build up stronger. But you need to make sure that the splits you're making have all of the suitable and adequate resources for rapid expansion. They need a mated queen, a well-mated queen that's proven. They need to have enough brood in all stages, but preferably enough capped Brood, because that means that it's so much easier for the colony to regulate its temperature. The other thing that I'll chuck in there is if you're doing these early season splits, makes it so much easier to take a split from one apiary, move it 3 miles away, do it in a separate apiary, because you're able to balance the boxes so much better. You can do it in the same apiary, but again, not my preferred choice. I would always recommend going to a separate apiary so you get that perfect balance. And if you want me to commit to an absolute earliest date as to when you should split your colonies in the UK, I'm going to go with the middle of April, 15th of April, as the absolute earliest you should even consider it. So if you go in 15th of April and they're not covering all of the frames, they've not got 8 frames of brood, then I'm not recommending a split. But if you go in 15th of April, they're bubbling up over the brood box like that, you've got 8 frames of capped brood, and you've got access to a mated queen— that's the final caveat that I would add— Then go ahead, make yourself a split. Definitely don't do walkaway splits at that point of the year. One half of that split is destined to fail if you let them try and rear a naturally bred emergency cell queen at that time of the year because they've got no drones to go out and mate with. What are your plans for the season? Are you doing lots of splits? You're targeting lots of honey? Stick it in the comments, I'm really interested to know. If you enjoyed that video, please give it a thumbs up, hit the subscribe button. We've got tons more beekeeping content in 2023.