[xroads]

Looking forward to starting my second year of beekeeping.

Year one had its ups & downs.

Started with two packages, package one did incredible, package two lost its queen right away and never recovered. I gave it a full honey super of honey and candy in the fall, but it didnt make it through the winter.

Hive one is looking really good and I started feeding it pollen last week. I plan on splitting it into four hives when the dandelions start blooming. Last year it filled two deep supers and three honey supers.

Right now I have three full honey supers to harvest and a deep to harvest. I didnt pull anything in the fall wanting to make sure they had plenty to make it through the winter.

 

[Robbin]

Spring is a wonderfull time of the year. Good luck

 

[dputt88]

im also going into year two, just ordered a couple packages and i have been buying bee boxes and frames with extra money all winter long. though im a little nervous to split my only hive.

 

[Moon]

Congrats on your first year and good luck on your second xroads! If I can make a suggestion that you'll hopefully take with several grains of salt it would be not to try and over split your hive. Getting 4 splits out of 1 colony early in the season is a good goal but be careful not to spread the resources of 1 strong colony between 4 weak colonies with 3 of them having to raise queens. Michael Bush has some excellent information on his website about bee math and the time it would take from when you split until your queen actually begins laying. Off the top of my head figure that if you split without a laying queen ready to split (which would be a really good option if you were to purchase mated queens somewhere) it would take ~16 days from the time the hive was split until the new queen hatched. From there it would take ~8-14 days before she is mated and laying. Following that it would be another 21 days before workers were hatching from your new queen. A rough estimate of 44-50 days before your new queen has produced new workers ready to begin building up the colony. If you were to split the 1st of May that will put you into late June almost July before the first brood cycle comes into play. In my opinion you would be money and time ahead to purchase 3 queens from a reputable breeder and make your splits with queens already laying. If this was already your plan, however, go ahead and disregard this post.

Best of luck!!