Texas Beekeepers - October too late for Splits?

[Grandma_DOG]

I meant to do splits in September when we started getting rain again and things bloom. However, I had to do alot of travel and didn't get it done, also I missed my bee meeting.

Does anyone in Texas know if I can do splits in 1st week of Oct?

[tecumseh]

unless you have mated queens I would not attempt splits in October.

[caticind]

Not in Texas, but I suggest you consider the bee math:

If you intend the splits to raise their own queen, it will take 14-16 days for her to hatch, and up to another 3 weeks to start laying.  Then you need time for her to rear at least one batch of workers, which will take 21 days to hatch and another 1-2 weeks to mature.  That's more than 2 months.  Do you have 2 months of daytime temps consistently above 55 left?  Probably not.

Add to which, if anything goes wrong - most likely the queens not being properly mated because most hives have kicked their drones out already, but any number of things can happen to a new queen - then you will lose that split because you won't have time to replace her.


If you have extra mated queens handy, you still need a minimum of 4-5 weeks to get a split established.  And your new queens could still fail.


Besides that, you will be weakening the original hives and the splits at a critical time.  Do you have enough stores to divide between the old hives and the splits and have them all eat well this winter?  I wouldn't count on being able to feed them up to strength.  My understanding is that in Texas, even more so than here, warmer winters mean the colony is more active and has more days out of the cluster, which means they actually need more stores to overwinter.


What was your original reason for splitting?  Swarm risk is nearly past for the year - if they didn't swarm during your September flow, they probably won't now.  If you just want more hives (and who doesn't!) you could do splits as soon as the flow starts next year and give them a much better chance.

[Joelel]

For some reason we just lost queens from 2 hives and they made a queen cell in each,we went back and they both were out. No queen in one and we combined it ,the other one we see the queen and are waiting to see if she gets mated and laying.