I am a realitivly new beek and this will be my first split. I've surfed the net and got about a million ways to do this. I would like your help.
I ordered a new queen from honey bee genetics in california. She will arrive friday or saturday. I have a 2 deep hive that I will be splitting to make to single deeps out of. I have several other frames of honey from a dead out hive last year. Please give your opinions on splitting the double hive and adding my new queen to do the split. Thank's, Brad
Piece o cake. Find the hive body with the queen and add the queen cell to the other. If you want to go a little further with it, remove all the frames with sealed brood (no eggs) and give the new queen to this hive. Leave all the open brood and eggs with the old, original queen.
Ive made splits, by just using frames of brood of mixed ages without any problems.
Use the honey frames from your deadout on the outside edges of your broodnest.
Others have talked about moving the hive with the new queen away 2 miles to keep the bees from drifting back to original hive. Is this really necessary? Thank's, Brad
Nope..you will lose a certain amount of foragers back to the original hive, but if you have two deeps worth of brood and bees, its not necessary. After you make the split and think that one hive might be a little light in numbers, shake a frame of nurse bees into the weak one. Or, switch the positions of the weak hive to the stronger one.
I AGREE WITH K9.NO NEED TO MOVE HIVE 2 MILES AWAY.ONE OTHER THING I WOULD DO IS PLACE SOME GRASS ORSTICKS IN FRONT OF THE HIVE TO MAKE THEM ORiENT to that hive. schawee
Quote from: VolunteerK9 on May 31, 2011, 03:39:59 PM
Nope..you will lose a certain amount of foragers back to the original hive,
But if you place the two splits side by side (or facing each other) in the location of the original hive, the foragers will tend to even out.
http://www.bushfarms.com/beessplits.htm (http://www.bushfarms.com/beessplits.htm)