What To Do Before Making Same Apiary Beehive Splits

In this video, I'm going to make splits like I've made up splits all the way throughout the season, but I'm going to keep those splits in the same apiary. I've had so many requests for this video. Everyone watches the making splits video and says, I've just got one apiary, so what do you do if you keep them in the same apiary? And you can do it, you definitely can do it. My preference is always to move them to a different apiary because it does make the process easier. It's absolutely fine doing it in the same apiary though. Few really important steps that you need to follow. That's what we're going to cover in this video.

So as with all of these videos, you will see all of the steps.

I'll stitch them all together into a single video, so make sure you stay tuned to the end of the video to see how strong these colonies get after about 2 or 3 months' time. We'll cover all the key important points from making the splits, introducing the queen, knocking down the queen cells, making them hopelessly queenless, Releasing the tab, releasing the queen, building the colony up, feeding the colony, getting them up to strength for winter. So the biggest piece of feedback I've got from people is I talk too much. So again, none of the talking. I'm going to put my bee suit on, get the smoker ready. Let's go and make some splits. Right, so let's make some splits that we're going to keep in the same apiary. Now, as always, when you're making splits, all you need to do is add some brood, add some stores, add some frames, add a queen, and you've got a colony. But if you do that in the wrong order or you do it in the wrong place, you either lose all the bees, the brood dies, they don't accept the queen. So you just need to follow the right steps. And the colony that you can see in front of me here— can't see the box that I've got down there, so I'll just flash that up now— I did a Demarest split on this last week. So I've just been coming through this one. I've got box on the top with loads of frames, brood in there, and they've pulled out some emergency cells up there as well, and there were some swarm cells in there anyway. So for the purpose of this video, forget about the swarm cells, I'm just going to pull them down. I'm going to use the brood frames in that top box to harvest some frames of brood, some frames of stores, and some bees, and I'm going to put them in my new box. So this is the frame of brood that I'm going to use. You can see they've drawn all that excess stuff down there as well. I'm going to take that off, I just want the national deep. So I'm going to harvest that national deep frame now, and I'm going to take that over and put it into my nuc. So there we go, I've got my frame of brood. I'm going to take that over with all of the bees, and because we're doing it from a Demerara split up top, we know that the queen's downstairs below the queen excluder. I don't need to worry about the queen. I know that all of these bees up here, completely queen-free. I haven't got to worry about finding the queen or doing anything different. So I've got a frame of bees, A frame of brood. I'm going to go and put that into my nuc. Now I've just adjusted the camera angle there because I want to show you how close to this hive I'm making this split. So here's my frame of brood. I'm taking it over here and I'm putting it into my nuc over here with all the bees in as well. Now in this nuc I've got 4 frames of drawn comb. You can do it with foundation, but if you're doing late splits, the more drawn comb you can put in there, the better. Really does make a big difference in terms of their growth and their ability to expand at a quicker rate. So here's the nuc now, 1 frame of brood, 4 frames of drawn-out comb. I'm going to go and find a frame of stores as well, and then that is the split pretty much complete. So here's my frame of stores, nice open accessible stores. Amazing how much they pack in here, it really is quite incredible. One frame of stores. You can see the remnants of some brood around the edges there as well. I'm going to take that over with all of the bees, put that into my nuc. So there we go, frame of stores. I'm just going to move it a couple of meters over here, taking that into my nuc now. Now we're pretty much done in terms of making up the nuc. Couple more things we need to do though. The first thing I would do in terms of a recommendation when you're making splits in the same apiary Face the entrances the other way round. So the original hive is facing out that way. On my new hive, I'm going to face the entrance in the complete opposite direction. I want to confuse the bees as much as possible and make them reorientate as best as they can. So at the moment, the entrance is facing that way. I'm going to turn that round and have the entrance facing the opposite way to that hive. The next thing you need to do is when you're making splits and you're taking them to a different apiary, You assess how many bees you're putting in the splits, you put the lid on, transfer them off to the new apiary, you get there, and every single bee will reorientate back to that nuc. In a situation like this, you will get drift. 100%, you will get drift, and you'll get a reasonable amount of drift as well. So I would say a good rule of thumb is to go for about 50% more bees than you want to make in the split, and assume that 50% of the bees are going to go out and fly back to that old hive. So we're going to stock this hive up now. We're going to shake in loads of bees from that Demerara split. No queens in there. Going to shake in a ton of bees, 50% more than I normally would making up a 2-frame split. So there we go, a really, really well-stocked nuc. And there's more bees in there than that. Loads of them have just rushed down trying to get out of this heat. Really, really well stocked. So we've got 4 frames of drawn-out foundation, drawn comb, 1 frame of brood in all stages, as capped as it can possibly be, definitely no queen cells, 1 frame of stores, and now we're going to add a mated queen. So here's my mated queen. You can't quite see her in there, but there is a mated queen in there just hiding away near that fondant. There she is, you can just see her walking along now. Only a couple of attendants in there, but that doesn't matter. The cap is well and truly Seal on. I'm going to take that queen now and I'm going to pop that into the middle. So important when you're making splits in your same apiary, make sure you put a queen in there. Don't leave them 7 days to go queenless. And I know that these have been used on a Demeray split anyway, so that, that frame of brood that I put in there, these are effectively hopelessly queenless already. But the technique that I use when I'm doing splits in the same apiary is the same technique. I'm going to leave this queen In the nuc, sealed for 7 days. I'm going to come back, check to see if there's any queen cells, which I know there won't be because they're hopelessly queenless already. And then I'm going to pop the cage, and then I'm going to let the queen come out. By putting the queen in at day zero, on the, the second that you make the split, you're going to attract and keep so many of those nurse bees because they've got capped brood, but you need something else to keep them in there. to attract the bees to stay here. If you don't put the queen in, they're very likely to abscond. At least that's what I've learned from my experience. So I'm going to pop the queen in now, in between the frame of brood and the frame of stores, with the cap on, close it up, leave it for 7 days. So there's my nuc now. I know it doesn't look like there's lots of bees in there. Believe me, that is full to the brim with bees. They've all just gone down to get out of the heat. I've got my queen in the middle there. She's fully capped. And all I need to do now is close that nuc up. So then take your lid, get the bees off around the edge, get your lid on, and then you think that's it, job's done. Definitely not. If you leave it like this, you will lose, I reckon, 90% to 95% of the bees. You'll still get a few stragglers in there hanging on to the queen, but what you need to do is you need to confuse the bees and get them to reorientate. You need to do it or they'll just fly out over there and come back to the old hive. And there's numerous ways you can do that. One way I would suggest is you just block them in for, say, a weekend. Definitely don't go blocking them in when it's warm like it is at the moment because they will just overheat. It's just not worth the risk. So you can do that. You can block them in for like 2 to 3 days and then they're just so confused that they will reorientate and you'll probably lose only like 10 or 20% back as drifting. The way that I would prefer to do it though, especially Especially when it's warm, is take some loose grass, fold it over a few times, and just jam that into the entrance. And the idea with that is that you're blocking them in temporarily. It might take them a good few hours, might take them 24 hours to work out how to get through the grass. They'll push it out, but what will happen is as they're going out through the grass, they're thinking, this isn't normal, we need to reorientate. And like I said, you're not looking to get 100% of those bees to stay stay back there. You've put in an additional contingency to enable you to lose some, and that is the key to making splits in your apiary. So here's the grass stuck in there now. We've got a few bees still around the edge, but what you need to make sure is that when you're putting the grass in, you're not stuffing it right in and making it really difficult. You're kind of stuffing it in like that and just leaving it just there. See how it's almost falling out? What you want is the bees to, to manage to get that out within, say, 24 hours. And in their efforts to try and get it out, that is what's going to help them reorientate. So there we go, we've successfully made a split and we've kept it in the same apiary. And as with all these videos, don't go anywhere yet. I'm going to show you this process all the way through. So I'm going to leave that 7 days, I'll come back, check for queen cells— probably not going to be any. I'll knock down any queen cells if I see them, pop the cage, release the queen, give them another 7 days, Just because I'm here every 7 days and I don't like checking them unnecessarily. And then after 14 days, I'll come back, I'll show you the amount of bees that we've retained in this split, I'll show you the frame of brood, the frame of stores, and hopefully we'll see the eggs and we'll see the queen. So I'll fast forward a week and we'll come back, see how we're getting on.

Right, so it's 8 days later. I've got my 2 splits that I made in the same apiary. Let's get inside, see if the queens are alive. See if there's emergency cells, and the big one, see how many bees have stayed in the splits. So here we go, here's my first nuc, and as you can see, not that many bees. And this is why I always recommend going and making your splits in a different apiary, because it's just a case of balancing how many bees you want in that nuc, taking it to a new apiary, and you keep all of the bees in that new nuc And they reorientate to that spot. When you're doing splits in the same apiary, it's always a little bit of a gamble, but don't worry about this. This is what I expected to see. I had 2 frames of brood in there, and I've kept enough bees to keep 2 frames of brood warm. That's all I needed here. It's a 2-frame split. I'm not expecting anything bigger than that, and you just need to take that into account when you're making the splits. If you're doing it in the same apiary, you will get a huge amount of drift, but as long as you open it up and they're covering the brood, it's mission accomplished really.

They will grow and grow from there.

So here is the other nuc that I set up at the same time. I didn't cover that on the video, but I did exactly the same process. A couple of frames of brood, and again, 2 or 3 frames of bees in this one. This one here, ever so slightly stronger. But as long as the bees are covering those frames, you're good to go. So next thing we're looking for, has the queen survived? And in the second one, yep, she's definitely survived. She's wandering around. There you go, you can see her there. All is good, we have an alive queen. Same with the first one, you can see the queen there, nice big white spot on her. They will have fed her, kept her in really good health in that cage. Both still sealed in at the I hope that's really interesting and I hope that's useful to see. The amount of bees that we threw in there was enough to cover a 6-frame nuc and make it a really strong 6-frame nuc. The bees will have gone out, they've gone and foraged thinking everything's okay. They won't have remembered that I've transferred them to a new nuc. It's just not how bees work. They go out, they know the surroundings, and they go back to where they're originally orientated to. So that's it for today. The bees here would have been nurse bees. They would have been blocked in. They would have been confused. You would have got a few of them would have reoriented to this spot, and then you've got some nurse bees that have just come on a little bit as well. So don't be disheartened if this is what you see. If you try this manipulation, this is what will happen. So just take in mind, don't put too many frames of brood in there. I think when you're doing it in your same apiary, one or two frames of brood. Brood absolute maximum. So what we're going to cover now, you need to go through the frames of brood, shake off all the bees. There will be emergency cells almost certainly. We're going to take down those emergency cells, we're going to open the cage, and then that's that part of the manipulation complete. So let's get into the nuc, see if there's any emergency cells. And then on the second colony here, we've got emergency cells. So like I say, the bees, they just go and do whatever they want I tend to find they at least make a couple of emergency cells, but sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. All we're going to do, if you find emergency cells, get them in, take them out with your hive tool, just remove them like that. You need to make sure they're completely gone. You're moving the colony into a state of hopeless queenlessness, and then we can release that. So Same again with this nuc here, taking off the tab, placing it down in between the brood frames, or the brood frame and the stores. We're going to close that up, give it another 7 days, and then we'll come back and see how we get on. So it's as simple as that. I told you you were going to have a dramatic drift from the nucs that you've made up back to the hives, and hopefully that's kind of what you were expecting. But it's end of July at the moment. That size colony there, which is 2 frames, is going to expand at a crazy, crazy rate. These will be very, very strong nucs going into winter, so don't worry about the size of the nucs. They're perfectly acceptable for this time of year. So when you're doing your introductions of the queens like that, we've popped the tabs now, they're going to do a slow introduction. The worst thing you can do after all this time is go back in after 24 hours just to check to see how they're getting on. I've seen it happen with my own eyes. You go in, the queen's walking on the frame, you lift the lid up, you take out a frame, and they ball the queen. And I don't know why they do it, and they don't do it all the time, but just don't give the bees a chance to mess things up. Give it 7 days. There's nothing that you can benefit from by going in early to check this. They will eat through the fondant if you've got that amount of bees in there. They will get through the fondant. Give it 7 days. Hopefully you'll go back in, you'll find the queen, you'll see she's laying eggs, and everything's fine. If they've released the queen and she's not laying eggs, don't worry about that at all. Queens don't lay eggs all the time. It might be that it's really bad weather, it might be that she just needs a couple of weeks to come into lay. Don't worry about that, just close them back up. 7 days later, see how they're getting on. So we'll fast forward 7 days, see if both of these queens have come out and If they're laying eggs.

Right, so it's been 7 days. We're going to check the splits that we made in the same apiary. Hopefully the queens have been released, hopefully they've started laying, and then we can look to see how these colonies will expand. So there's a little bit of growth from last week. That's just due to all of the brood emerging from those 2 brood frames. We've probably split over 3 frames now. It's a decent-sized nuc at this point of the year, very early August at the moment. Let's get inside, see if that queen's been released, and see if we can find any eggs. So we've got a completely empty queen cage. They've eaten through all of that fondant. And then on this side of the frame over here, we've got a queen. So we've got a successful introduction in this first split over here. And then when you look into the middle, which is always impossible to do, you can see that she is laying up the center of that frame with eggs as well. Straight into split number 2, and there we go, the queen is in split number 2 as well. Really good-looking queen. Two successful introductions for making splits in the same apiary. So there we go. That's two successful splits in the same apiary. Two successful queen introductions. Now I'm not going to fast forward the video any further than that because all that's going to happen with these colonies now is they're going to grow and expand. They're on three frames already, and this apiary here—we're so close to the Himalayan balsam—they are going to be absolutely booming by the time it comes to winter. Probably going to be looking at extension boxes for both of these because they're big colonies already. So there's no need to cover it any further in this video, but I've showed you how to make splits within the same apiary. Take into account all of the points that we've discussed in this video, and it will leave you with really strong splits going into winter.