How to create big hives for maximum honey

[TheHoneyPump]

Bob, feel free to revise and plagiarize the PMs of how to prime the honey pump.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Acebird]

Thats my biggest issue.  I had mixed results with cut downs or removing the queen, especially with only 20 or 30 hives.

All I ever did is walk away splits in Utica, NY with the goal to maintain 3 hives.  Utica is just south of the Adirondack park.  Now if you are in the Adirondack park that is a different story because there is not much to forage on after the trees bloom.  This is another reason of how important location is.

[Michael Bush]

I dare you to take a booming hive, separate out all of the mostly capped brood and not have any eggs and young brood in that capped brood.  If you can, then the hive is far to weak to be doing a cut down split.  No point in purposely putting a frame of eggs in the old hive.

[Bob Wilson]

If I pull a nuc WITH the old queen out of a strong hive with queen cells, can/will the queenless hive still swarm when a virgin emerges?

[Michael Bush]

If you didnt remove enough resources they might.  Doubtful if you took five frames out of them and the old queen.  But not impossible.  Put the new frames in the brood nest to stack the deck in your favor.

[Bill Murray]

A shout out to all that contributed, this was a good thread with a lot of good information in it.