Beesource Beekeeping Forums banner

On doing splits

3K views 11 replies 5 participants last post by  scdw43 
#1 ·
When doing splits where you just divide the boxes evenly and one hive gets the queen and the other has to make one, can the hive without the queen produce one if they have open brood, or do they have to have eggs. I have a hard time seeing those tiny eggs, but can see the open brood pretty well.

Thanks in advance for the help. :)
 
#2 ·
If you can isolate the frame w/ the queen on it, and remove it to a nuc away from the hive (or something similar), you'll get a bunch of frames with queen cells in the original hive. The trick to getting 'quality' queens, besides starting with a strong hive, is to go back 4 days after removing the queen, and destroying those early queen cells. The new queen cells will be what you want to work with.

You can then start nucs with each of those frames containing queen cells. If you're ambitious, you can also use single frames with a new queen cell that you've attached.
 
#4 ·
Basically, yes.

If you simply distributed the frames between two new hive bodies, you would still end up with many queen cells. If you did nothing else, many of those queen cells would go to waste, or cause other issues.

If you remove the queen first, then go back in 4 days to scrape queen cells, you would know that you have 10 days till the new queen cells are ready for 'whatever' since you've lowered the age range of the remaining eggs.
 
#6 ·
If you remove the queen first, then go back in 4 days to scrape queen cells, you would know that you have 10 days till the new queen cells are ready for 'whatever' since you've lowered the age range of the remaining eggs.
When you say "scrape the queen cells," what do you mean? I have watched youtube videos where queen cells were cut out with a knife and "pressed" into the comb on another frame.

Thanks
 
#7 ·
You scrape/pinch the queen cells that were made from older eggs to kill them. It also sets up the timing where you come back in 10 days with the knife to cut out the now less fragile queen cell to press into a frame of your choosing.

What I'm trying to convey is that you don't have to do a classic walk away split when it's pretty easy to raise your own queens and start new colonies in nucs.
 
#8 ·
not sure how this 4 day thing started but split the hine in half. like one guy said if you find the queen this is probable where the eggs are. they need these eggs to start a cell. we make about 100 nucs up in loris. we give them 3 frames of brood (2capped and 1 eggs) and two honey .two many frames of open brood takes too much of the of their work force. the way we make nus gives us about a 85% sucess rate for queens. keep it simple.
 
#11 ·
What's the big deal then? If he splits or not, there's no flow right now. What's he gonna do if the hives aren't making a honey crop anyway?

He might want to feed regardless.

However, there's always the question of when the next flow is going to occur since that will determine the timing of when to do spits, increases etc. .

Should he do it now and feed to take advantage of the fall flow?

I know that in my area, the timing was early this year. The fact is I made 4 more nucs this very morning. However, I have the advantage of horticultural displays that are changed frequently. So, I don't worry about the timing of flows, but I am concerned about weather.

It hit 120 degrees F on the roof where my bees are located last summer. The roots cooked in the planters it got so hot. It didn't help the bees either.
 
#12 ·
Bees will not start queen cells with larva to old if given eggs or larva of the right age to make queen cells. If they were so inclined, we would need to requeen a hive after the queen has been replaced by the bees. As has been said by so many of the people on this forum, bees make better beekeepers than we do.
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top