When To Split A Beehive - Is It Too Late?

Making splits is one of the most fun and profitable things to do in beekeeping, but don't get caught out and don't make your splits too late. In this video, I'm going to talk to you about the latest possible time that you should be making splits and give you a few tips to make sure that those splits make it through the winter. So I've spoken about this previously, and we use various different methods for making splits to get them ready to go through the winter. You can start making your splits up in May with a single frame of brood, a single frame of stores, and just trickle feed them, keep them going, and let them build up really slowly and naturally. And as you get to the point around mid-July, back end of July, where they're filling a 6-frame box, they are going to be absolutely fine to go through the winter. So that's option 1, start early, plan ahead. That's the cheapest and the most effective way to get your nucs ready and built up for winter. However, although that's the cheapest way to do it, I'd say it's probably the one that requires the most effort. You're constantly going back there, you're constantly feeding, sometimes you need to add in additional brood. It's a cheap process because you're not using that much resource, But it's an expensive process because you're using a lot of your time. It's not a process that we use anymore because it does just sap a little bit too much time. The process that we use now is that we wait until as late as possible in the season, and then we make as small a split as possible to make sure that the colony can combat wasps. So this is going to be different depending on where you are in the country, but for us in North Wales, we go around the first week in August and we make a 6-frame split using a minimum of 3 full frames of brood. and 1 or 2 frames of stores. Now you can probably push that down to 2 frames of brood. The key thing here is making sure that you have sufficient bees of all ages within that nuc, and we make sure that we do that by making the split and taking it to a separate apiary. So you know whatever you put into that nuc stays within the nuc, doesn't drift back to its hive, and you can immediately feed from the day that you move it to the new apiary. Don't get caught out making splits like that, putting it in the same apiary, All that happens is the old forager bees go back to the original split, tell all their mates that there's loads of feed in this new nuc, and they just go and ravage everything. You end up losing the queen, losing the brood, losing the food. You lose everything. Believe me, I've been there. So that's the technique that we use. Reason I'm doing this video though, and it's the middle of September here at the moment, is I'm going through some of my colonies at the moment and I'm so tempted to make up some more splits. And it just got me thinking about kind of what happened to me maybe 4 or 5 years ago. I was in exactly the same position. I had loads of equipment, I had loads of spare queens. I kind of thought, you know what, the colonies are looking really nice and big, I'm going to take some strong splits from some colonies that I've condensed down to a single box, and I'm going to double my money. I'm going to turn one colony into 2 in the middle of September, and the colony that I've split from, that'll get through winter fine, and that'll build up fine, and then I've got myself another split. Bees can be very, very deceiving at this point of year. You've still got a lot of summer bees in the colony. Summer bees do not live very long, between 4 to 6 weeks, and all the bees are waiting for at the moment is a nice last-minute snap of weather. And for us, the ivy flow. We find as soon as that hits, the queens go crazy, they lay their winter bees, and then the colony is ready and set for winter. Now, going in at this point of the year and taking out a substantial split, and you really do need to make a substantial split to make it work at this time of year, is a catastrophe. It really is. Absolute worst possible thing to be doing. And I say that again from personal experience. Going back to that episode 4 or 5 years ago, I had by far and away my worst winter losses because I got greedy and I tried to make my splits far too late in the season. So my advice to you is don't make the splits late in the season, and this is the reason why. So at the moment, you'll go into that colony and it will appear that there's a lot of bees. You might be on 5, 6 frames of brood and you might split that evenly between the 2 splits. In reality, what you've got there is a lot of very old summer forager bees that are very close to dying. What happens is you make that split, let's call it a complete 50/50 split, you go away, you take it to a new apiary, you've got a complete even balanced 50/50 split, and then within say a couple of weeks, the numbers have dwindled. You've got nowhere near as many bees there, which means that the respective queens in both of those colonies can't produce anywhere near as many winter bees. Which means that the overwintering cluster size of both of those colonies is dramatically lower than if they were to stay together in a single unit. That's the prime reason why you get really bad overwintering success if you make your splits late in the season like that. So this video is a direct result of someone saying, how late in the season can you make your splits? I'm doing the video middle of September, and I want to do a video for those people looking into their colonies at the moment thinking, I can turn 1 hive into 2, or I can turn 10 hives into 20. And I just want to tell you from my own experience, it really is getting a little bit too late. To do that. Latest for me, first week of August, 3 frames of brood, 1 frame of stores, good shake of bees in there as well. Fill the box up with bees. You're giving not only the split time to build up and get strong for winter, but you're giving that donor colony a really good chance to build back up again using the late season resources. So both the donor colony and the splits stand a really good chance of getting through winter.