A day passes in between the split and pick up. You split the hive one day and pick it up between 24 to 36 hours later. I put newspaper between the boxes, then a day or two later, the paper is removed and all the brood and bees are moved into the to-make-queen boxes, which now have the title of nucleus hives.

They are simply merged with the to-make-queens splits. It’s not so critical with the splits whose genetics I’m not keeping. There is less chance that a queen will mate with a drone from the same bee yard as the queens fly out low, then rise to avoid mating with their brothers. I could move them to another near-by yard, but two problems would arise: 1) The foragers might fly back anyway – move bees 2 feet or 2 miles, as the old saying goes, or they’ll go back to the parent hive, 2) The queens produced in the new bee yard could encounter a close male relative, coming from the parent hive’s bee yard, on a mating flight. They fly out of their lovely new home and say “wait, home’s over there” and fly back to the parent hive (darn their multiple eyes). The downside of this is I lose the foragers. Up river splits get placed in the same bee yard as their parent hives. In other down river areas, there is too little diversity in the stock and I fear inbreeding on mating flights. Italians are nice bees, but in my view, not particularly suited for or wet, cold weather with long winters. I don’t know who they are and I think many are Italian. I don’t particularly want those genetics. There are lots of other bees about from beekeepers doing pollination contracts in the fields. A portion of the down river area is agricultural. The splits from down river are distributed amount my up river bee yards, where my bee mating area is located. I use the first splits of the year to breed a few new queens from the hives I think showed good promise: good health, good honey stores, and good over wintering. Leave a swarm cell and the hive will swarm no matter how many bees you remove. Some of the hives were very enthusiastic in their desire to produce new queens. I say “whoopee” and put them in the split or splits. Equally, if one removes a box of bees and brood from the hive the reduced population will be less inclined to swarm.ĭuring this process, the removal of swarm cells is vital.

The theory, of course, is that if you give the bees room, they will be less inclined to swarm. Weather is like bees: Expect the Unexpected. This year, we had sun, with a little rain and a very odd morning snowstorm (between 60F degree days). What can I say? Our weather in April/May is usual variable from rain and snow to momentary glimpses of sun. Over the previous four weeks they had expanded with gusto. It quickly became split and super many of the hives at the same time. The intention was to either split or super the ones that were getting crowded to keep them from swarming. About 3 weeks ago I went through all my hives, again.

Bee hive split