Great question! I plan to split my hive this coming spring. I want to take some frames from my current hive and put them in a new 10-frame box with a new queen to start a new colony. I'd rather do that than make a nuc.

However, I would like to put the hives side-by-side. The new hive would be close to the old hive.

I've been told that once I put a new queen in the new hive with the three or so frames from the old hive, that the nurse bees and foragers would re-orient themselves and not go back to the old hive. But it seems like they would fly out, do their thing, then go back to the old hive.

Ideas?

 

If you're putting them side-by-side. Slide the original hive over a couple of feet and have both hives share the footprint of the old hive. You'll get some good drift by sharing the old space.

 

Exiting foragers will return to the old hive and existing nurse bees will stay where you put them. As long as there is a queen and brood where you put them. Dump extra bees in the hives that you put in new positions to make sure that after the foragers leave that you still have enough bees left.

Robbing can be an issue though so watch for it.

 

robbing wont be an issue, all i have to do is reduce the hive entrance, but im not going planning on puting in my own queen but let the bees make their own, will the supply of bees last until the queen is mated and laying?

 

So, when i split the hive, leaving 10 frames in the mother hive, will the bees go back to the mother hive or whichever hive has the queen, or will the brood keep the bees there?

Foragers will go back to the original hive position so they'll stay in or join whichever hive you put there. It might help to put some kind of obstruction like a tree branch in front of the split hives to cause bees to reorient when they leave causing them to stay at whichever split they left (some folks swear by this method, others curse it). I've tried it and had mixed results. If you do nothing to cause bees to reorient, the foragers will tend to return to whatever hive is in the original split hives location. If there's no hive in the original hives location they will tend to join a nearby hive, where they'll be welcomed if they're bringing in a honey stomach full of nectar.

The queen doesn't necessarily attract workers from splits. The brood will tend to keep the nurse bees that were on them when the split was made. If you have the split hives very close to eachother, I don't care how small you make the entrance, the strongest hive will have a huge advantage over the small queenless splits and robbing WILL be a problem, especially if the bees are italians. One factor that will help prevent robbing is doing the split during a strong honeyflow. When there's nectar to collect, foragers tend to not try robbing. Until the small splits have either made a queen or you've given them a queen and that queen has started laying a bunch of brood, the splits will be very weak and vulnerable to robbing.

I think it's a good idea to keep splits out of an established bee yard with strong hives because of the robbing issue.

 

i see what you mean about the robbing issue, but all i have is one hive and a backyard so thats not really an option, ill probbally take your advice and do it during a flow if possible, but if not i dont have a choice, i gotta expand

 

I don't think I'd risk my only hive that way. I'd find another way to increase whether it's buy another package of bees or nuc, catch some with a swarm trap, hive a swarm or do a cutout. If something goes wrong you could lose all of your bees. Most folks will recommend that you start with two hives. You get to compare them that way. If one dies out you're not out of the business. Also, if one goes queenless you've got a source of brood to raise a queen. If you had two hives I wouldn't caution you against splitting one of them. If you must split your only hive I'd just take a frame or two of brood and start with one split, not such a radical split for your first time out of your only hive.

Sounds like you've got the bee fever. I remember what that was like when I started out.

 

I would watch out making to many splits from one hive. the splits i make it have put 2-8 frames of brood and eggs in and then shake in another 2-3 frames of bees. it seems like you loose a fair amount of field bees back to the origional hive. with robbing i think that the new hives dont really guard there entrance very well for a week or so until the bees get older. at least that is my theory. i had problems with robbing when i used boardman feeders. once i started feeding in the top the robbing slowed down. I just did a split and it tried to make a queen from 8 cells but non of them took. so i orderd a replacement queen.

 

I live in West Tennessee and I have three hives. My newest hive is all Russian, and the original first hive is mostly Russian, has one large brood chamber on the bottom, two medium supers on top of that, then an excluder, then two supers on top, but that was after it swarmed this spring. It swarmed three times, and I watched the first large swarm go over the fence into the neighbors yard, and then to gosh knows where. OOPS, then I thought it was over, but two smaller ones in the next week left. One of which I caught in my peach tree and put in a hive. They left again for good a day or so later, even with confinement.

My hives are on a bee deck at the corner of our garden by a fence. They fly up and over the fence each day.

Anyway, in an attempt to mitigate all of this, I fed some sugar water in a boardman feeder to the original hive for a while, thinking that they had taken all the honey. They did well, and multiplied. So I put another super above the one already over the excluder, thinking that it would give them plenty of room. They had filled the one just above the excluder with nectar not capped yet.

End of July, they are OVER abundant. I look inside and there are bees coming out the top, bees all over the front that don't go inside no matter what the weather. Bees everywhere on every frame. I start to get paranoid and my husband says you better DO something or they will swarm again. I agree and finally
the first of August got my smoker going and all my equipment, and a tote to put honey in, and opened it up.

Let me backpedal a bit to say that during the preceding week, looking for solutions, I came across the articles written by WALT WRIGHT who talked about checkering, and also splits. Boy is he a researcher! I downloaded the whole bunch of his articles and sat on my front porch for hours reading. I thought, O...kay, I only have two hives, so let me just experiment.

He talked about the "honey dome" above the broodnest and said that if that were opened up with empty frames, then it not only would mitigate swarming, but allow the bees room to make babies. I may have gotten the premise wrong, but hey, I'm a 2 year beginner, and I kind of consider my beekeeping to be a little experimental anyway. I only just grasped the premises he wrote about, and as confused as I sometimes get (grin), it made sense to me.

So, I did both. I split the hive, taking half of the honey, half the brood, eggs, larvae, bees, and young bees, putting them into a new hive bottom with one med super on top of that. No excluder. I put empty frames on either side of the brood chamber, brood and eggs in the center, and alternated empty with the rest in the upper super. Then I (on the advice of my husband) put a feeder of sugar water on the front (both old and new hives), and cut some screen wire and taped it onto the front opening.

Then since I knew a heat wave was coming that week, took another empty super, put a screened inner cover on it (hole taped shut), and taped it to the super so that it couldn't come off. (The bees immediately ran out to try to escape, but I was faster than they were). I then put two shims on that and the cover on the shims ( a raised roof) so that everything would be ventilated. And since I use ventilated bottom boards, that was also.

I have always read that when you split you REDUCE the entrance. I actually closed the entrance with the screen, because this hive is only two feet from the old one, and I wasn't sure that I hadn't moved the original queen with the frames I put in the new one. (My eyesight just . . . I never see the queen and it embarasses me to peeces) Anyway I was worried that they would try to go back to the original hive and decided (on advice) to prevent it for a few days by quarantining them, albeit with a lot of ventilation.

Problem is, I think I moved the queen, and the next day, there were bunches of bees from the original hive just having a hissy fit all round the new split. And when I approached the hives one of those mad bees jumped me with no warning (NOT USUAL), and stung me right on the tip of my NOSE! Sheesh. Usually them gals at least give me a head butt to warn me, but this one was hysterically p'd off. I think they smelled her and were pissed that they couldn't get to her. (GO HOME AND MAKE ANOTHER QUEEN YOU MAD BEES! I thought.)

I ran to the house to get some Denvers Sting Stop and thought my whole head was going to swell up. It didn't thank goodness, coz I think she just grazed me. I'm pretty quick at scraping stings out, but I had been stung twice while splitting the hive and I was tired of getting stung that week. ITCH ITCH ITCH. And that yellow stuff all over my nose was real decorative.

NOW, with all that said, my question is: Should I have closed the entrance, and if I should have, when do I release them? And what else do I need to know because I am totally sure I'm missing something.

I have pictures, but had difficulty finding how to include them. It keeps asking me for the url of the photo, but I don't have an url. It's on my computer where I keep my pics.