First split of 2021

We did our second inspection of 2021 this morning, and already some of the bees are preparing for swarming. Hive 1 had two queen cells, one sealed and the other still open.

You can see the sealed one in the photo below.

Hive reproduction

Swarming is the bees' way of creating more colonies. The queen and half of the bees leave the hive and go to find a new home. Meanwhile the original hive nurtures a new queen from one of the queen cells left behind before the original queen left.

It's hard to discourage bees from swarming once they get it into their heads. You can squash any queen cells you find (but you'd better find ALL of them!). You can give the bees more space. Sometimes this works.

But once they start making queen cells it is usually best to do for them artificially what they want to do in nature, ie split the colony into two.

Nucleus method

There are a number of methods of splitting hives that have been developed by beekeepers over the years. Some are highly complex. Some require you to return every few days for a couple of weeks.

The simplest method (and the one I can get my head around) is the "nucleus method". A nucleus is a small colony (usually of 3-6 frames). All this method involves is taking the original queen out of the hive and putting her in a nucleus box, along with two frames of brood, a frame of stores and plenty of nurse bees from the original colony.

This is doing a kind of swarm, artificially, before the bees do it themselves and end up in a tree. The queen leaves the hive with half of the bees. The remaining hive detects that she has gone and raises a new queen. It's simple. It has its limitations, but last year it worked well for us. So I expect that is what we'll be doing again this year to a number of our hives.

Of course this does mean you can potentially double your number of hives. If this is an issue (and it probably will be for us - we do not have unlimited space or time!) you can "unite" the two colonies back again after the swarming season is over, keeping just one of the queens (probably the younger one).

First inspection of 2021

We visited the apiary last week to say hello to the bees for the first time in 2021.

We're delighted to report fantastic news: all five hives are alive, growing and have a healthy laying queen.

This is brilliant news. March is a dangerous time for honeybees, because if it is cold and spring starts late then they can run out of food and starve. It's rather sad to think that they get most of the way through the winter and then run out of food just at the end. But of course that's when it is going to run out isn't it? You don't run out of petrol just after you left home.

Alive and healthy

But in the case of our hives all of them are alive and building up. We found eggs and brood in all five, and we even saw the queen in hives 1 and 3.

Moving supers over

During winter we put the "supers" (which are the smaller boxes that bees store honey in) underneath the bigger brood box. This lifts up the brood nest which is where bees generally like to be in winter.

Once spring arrives we turn it all around again, and move the supers on top of the brood boxes. We also put a queen excluder between the two so that the queen stays in the lower brood box and the supers above are just used for honey storage.

So we did all that last week. Unfortunately in three of our colonies we did not see the queen, so we cannot be absolutely sure that she is in the lower box. This means we'll have to be super-attentive in future inspections to make sure she is where we want her to be.



What's next?

This is an important time of year for bees. They are building up in numbers and of course they are also thinking about reproduction. Honey bee colonies reproduce by swarming, which is when half of the bees, plus the queen, leave the hive and go and find a new home. For the beekeeper this is bad news because they lose half of their bees! It really sets a colony back, so we do as much as we can to discourage it. So in future inspections we'll be looking for signs of swarming and taking steps to (hopefully) prevent it. It doesn't always work of course - the bees' desire to reproduce is pretty strong! More on that in future posts.