A beginner's guide to walk-away splits

today is a gorgeous day and it's the middle of May and we are doing some splits and we thought why not show some of you guys had to do a split if you haven't done one yet and this is something that is really great to do if you lost colonies over winter and you want to recoup your losses or if you simply want to expand your operation size and start getting more colonies some new beekeepers are a little tentative of doing splits and we're hoping through this video we can show you that this is something that anyone can really do bees are quite resilient so even if you're not following the formula exactly for a perfect split it's totally fine we encourage everyone to give it a try and test themselves and see how it goes and if you ever have questions during the process you can always reach out to us so this is a colony that overwintered in two deep sand one medium and there's no Queen excluder in between here so I suspect that there could be some brood up here but that's okay I'll tell you guys how to deal with that when we come the type of split that we're going to be doing is called a walkaway split meaning we are going to have one colony that has the Queen in it I'll probably put her in this box and then the other colony is going to rear her own queen so we're going to walk away after doing this split and after a few weeks time there will be a new queen in that hi befall goes well with us we have our smoker we also have a debris bucket where we like to put any scrapings of Burque home or anything else maybe the bottom board will be dirty and we'll want to give that a clean scrape to so we like to have a bucket here so that we're not throwing that debris in our yard as it can attract pests we also have two extra boxes here which might not be what some folks are used to and doing a split really we have two boxes here that we can use to shuffle frames around but I figure for a demonstration it's actually really easy to do it this way and if you have the extra equipment it makes it pretty easy as you go along so let's get started okay so removing this inner cover we can see that we have some protein paddy on there or actually just protein that I threw on top of there that we're actually getting ready to remove they don't need this anymore there's plenty of food coming in in this top box which is a super it's not really overflowing with bees though I do see many of the frames are covered so we'll see if this colony is strong enough this looks good so if you can see the population from there it is covered with bees covering most of the frames I'm immediately looking down into the brood my eye starts to look to see if there are varroa mites in this brood and that's something that I always check for any time there's drone brood in between boxes and some of those cells get opened up but so far those look pretty clean we did monitor this colony about a month ago for mites and it had none which is great news we are due to do another monitoring very soon people often ask well how do you know when it's the right time and generally around mid-may is the time that a lot of folks start and sometimes some will even start sooner if the weather is really nice but one good key thing that you can see if you look down some of these frames and will also see them as we pull the frames out but you can see lots of capped drone brood in a few of these frames and capped drone brood is a sign that we can start doing walkaway splits or even Queen rearing because what that means is if our colonies are going to rear our new queen it takes about 16 days for her to develop and then after she emerges she needs to sexually mature and then go out for her mating flight and that can be a little over a week as well so by the time that the queen is ready to meet a lot of these drone cells that we have in colonies around this area will also be emerging and ready to make - so this shows that there's probably going to be a good availability of drones around at that time if we're trying to rear rear Queens from colonies at a time when there's really no drones available in the environment then she might not get made it all that well so that's why there's some caution for doing it a little too soon all right so before we start disassembling this colony and putting them into our two boxes I'll give you a little bit of an overview of what we're thinking here so when we do a split or essentially splitting that colony into two colonies in each of the colonies we're going to have about the same amount of resources we're going to have brood in the middle typically we want to have at least three frames of that's going to be flanked by ideally some pollen which is food that the nurse bees can feed to the brood right away and also some drawn comb so that the Queen has space to continue laying immediately in that brood nest area and then on the outside frames we're looking to have honey and maybe a little bit of pollen can be mixed in there too now keep in mind that is our ideal formula but we are not guaranteed to get that in every colony we essentially work with what we can in general brood in the middle some drawn comb and some food is how we're thinking of it it's really important to keep the brood centered in the hive altogether because we certainly don't want to be breaking up the brood nest at this time of year we can still have some cool nights at the end of May and so keeping their brood nest together will allow the bees to easily cluster over it when I said that we're keeping things fairly similar there is one other thing to keep in mind one of these boxes is going to have the Queen and it's going to end up back on the same stand so the original hive is going to stay there and when it has the Queen in there it's going to continue on just as it normally would but this box that doesn't have a queen we're actually going to be moving it somewhere else at the die slab so it's still in the same yard essentially it's not very far away but it's going to be in a new place and so any foragers that go into this box when they go out and they forage for food instead of coming back to their new homes location they're gonna come back here to their old location because they've oriented to that place and so what that means is that we could lose some of our population that we put into this split so to try to overcome that if your split is going to remain in that same area we want to give them a little extra cat brood if possible because that will emerge into some nurse bees and have an immediate population boost and another thing that we can do is we can shake some beads ideally nurse bees that are gonna stay in this box from our parent hive into this colony at the end and so that will ensure that they do have enough bees to cluster around that brood and keep that brood warm so that's our game plan so now we're gonna go frame by frame see what we have and start putting it in those boxes and you know there's a lot of ways that you can do splits talk to folks in your club other great videos to watch or by the University of Guelph they have great beekeeping videos and I believe that they have one on showing different ways to do a split so this is just the way that we do it there's a lot of different approaches to it feel free to kind of look around and see what might be the best method for you to try alright so this is our first frame that we've pulled out and it is a honey frame honey on both sides I'm gonna quickly scan for the Queen we want to keep an eye out for her because I want to know exactly which box she's going in and I'm going to put this right into an end position here in this box food frame in the end all right and our next frame is also honey again quick check for the Queen I doubt she's on here but you can always be surprised and I'm going to put this in an imposition another thing that I'm gonna keep my eye out for are swarm cells we've had three of our other colonies while we were doing splits show that they are thinking about swarming and are actually preparing to swarm in building cells and in that case I want to make sure I know where those cells are going it's a good idea if you do have swarm cells you can put them in the box at your Queens not going into they're already starting to make a queen it'll speed up the process but in the box that the Queen goes in I want to make sure that no swarm cells are going to be in there so either I don't transfer those frames or I cut those cells out so when we're looking on this frame here we're seeing that again it's a food frame there is open nectar on there they're bringing that in there's also some capped honey which is old leftover from winter and there's some pollen you'll also probably notice a fair amount of drones on this frame and that's really great that shows that it is a good time to be doing these splits there are going to be drones in the area for the Queen to mate with and when I say that I mean I don't mean that the Queen is actually going to be mating with drones from the same colony but typically if there are other colonies in this area that are producing drones she might be meeting with them okay so with another food frame I'm going to be putting this in an in position I predict in this colony we might see most of the brood nest and honey is up top here and we might see a lot of drawn comb in the bottom box and overwinter our colony that sort of started in the bottom box has moved up as it's consuming its honey stores and a lot of beekeepers will actually reverse their hive bodies to provide more space above the brood nest but if you don't do that and if you don't do splits then oftentimes the colony will sort of naturally go back down but that's what I'm predicting we'll see we'll find out as we go through here so we are on to our third frame now okay and we have lots of brood on here we have lots of open brood and lots of eggs on this side so I'm definitely going to be looking for the Queen here I'll let you kind of check out this frame the eggs are in the center we have older cat brood along the edge that's starting to emerge yeah we have some cups on the top as well so we're gonna take a peek in some of those cups I'll point them out to you here there's one here and another one here and I want to just look inside to see if it's become a queen cell and it's become a queen cell if there are eggs or larvae in them and both of those are empty and actually there's another one over here that is also empty okay and this side is most of the same looking at brood and we actually have our queen on here and this queen is marked blue she is actually this is her third year so she's getting up there we might start thinking about reak weaning soon so we're just gonna put this Queen in a cage so that we can safely keep track of her and know exactly which colony she's gonna go into okay so we got her here by the wings nice and gentle so now this bird frame with lots of open brood I'm going to put that right in the box it can go in either box really but I'm going to put array in the center okay so this frame is awesome here we have a nice frame full of capped brood and this is a frame I'm going to put in the other box the one that doesn't contain the Queen because all this brood is going to emerge very soon and give that colony a population boost even though this queen is old she has a pretty good pattern right now going still we also have another side full of capped brood I'm seeing a cup on the bottom I'm just going to check inside of these and make sure that they're not swarm cells and they are not okay so this is going to go in here and I've just determined that my queen is going to be going into this box here one other thing that I'll mention is that since this colony is going to be rearing its own queen we want to make sure that we're giving it eggs once those eggs hatch the bees are going to be feeding royal jelly to whoever they determine is going to be the new queen so we want really young larvae that's freshly hatching out of eggs so that they can start to make a queen seller to out of some of those okay so here we have more capped brood a lot more drone comb actually and a couple of cups on the bottom to check and they are empty and these beers are very gentle but I do like to give just a little bit of smoke every now and then to make sure that I'm not squishing them as I'm separating some of these streams and sticking my hive tool in there okay so now we have some more mix brewed I am actively looking for eggs because I want to make sure that there going to be some eggs going into that other self and we do have eggs on this side this is a nice frame full of eggs I'm going to put that right in this box and since it has younger brood on it too I'm gonna put it next to that frame that had lots of capped brood so so far we have three frames of brood in that colony I do want to make sure that that other box also has at least three frames of brood so we'll keep on dimming and actually I might just go ahead and do this part a little bit quickly and then let you know if we're seeing anything cool worth mentioning but I'm keeping it up okay one other thing here to point out is that we do have a lot of pollen on the outside of this frame and this girl has got a pollen baskets fuller right now [Music] all right so we got two more frames left I'm going to put them both in this box this frame is almost entirely drawn comb so I'm gonna stick that right at the edge of our brood nest here to give our new queen some immediate space to lay once she's ready and let's see what's on this last frame dron come drunk home and here you'll actually see that there is a little bit of mold dusting that comb in the end position there that is okay this is a bit of a moist area as you can tell the the colony that has been in here has winter dwell every year there always is a little bit of mold in the spring and the colony does a great job cleaning it up on its own so I'm not too worried giving a frame like this back to the bees at this time of year they'll have it cleaned up in no time okay so now we have our two colonies my prediction of having a lot of drawn comb in the bottom was correct though we also had a lot of brood down there too so each of these colonies has at least four frames of brood mixed brood we've got capped brood we've got open brood and we've got eggs to this colony has a little bit more capped brood in it just because I want to boost that population since we're going to be moving in and a lot of the foragers are gonna fly back to the original hive so our brood nest in both hives is in the center here we're keeping it together followed by a couple frames of drawn comb and some food frames and on those brood frames we have some food too we have lots of pollen that's coming in lots of different colors which is great and also some nectar coming in as well so at this point in time what we're gonna do is we're going to release the Queen into this box and then we're going to scrape that bottom board clean because there is quite a bit of debris that's built up there over winter that they haven't fully cleaned out yet so Queen is in here just gonna throw her in and I'm gonna watch her go down and make sure that she gets in there safely alright so she moved in there now I'm gonna clean off this bottom board and then I'm going to put our queen right colony on this spot [Music] back in her spot with a nice clean bottom board another thing that I'm going to do as well is peek in this medium to see if there's any brood in here like I mentioned there wasn't a queen excluder separating these boxes so she had free rein to lay wherever she wanted since I know she's in the bottom right now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna throw an excluder right on there to separate these boxes if there is any brood up here it'll eventually hatch out a hat there is so not to worry we're gonna put a queen excluder in between these boxes allow that brood to hatch out and they'll just refill it with honey no big deal let's close this colony up just gonna give him a bit of smoke so I'm not squishing in with this excluder I'm quite stuck in the mud here I'm going to put my honey super in here it's exciting to see that they're already bringing in nectar I know that the queen is safe down below okay and there we have our split okay so we are going to add a lid to that queenless box and we're going to move it to its spot in the yard and we're actually going to leave Abby for quite some time for a matter of weeks actually you'll remember that there was no Queen in this colony there are eggs if there was a swarm cell in there then it would mature a little bit quicker but if we were starting from an egg it takes about 16 days for a queen to emerge and then it can take over a week for her to mature and go out and mate so we're probably going to leave this colony for close to a month before we go back in here and see what the situation is like and there you have it that's how you do a split so if you've done a split before and you have some tips for other people on facebook or some things that I forgot to mention then feel free to leave it in the comments I hope that everyone is able to get to the point where they are sustainable in their beekeeping and able to continue growing or replacing losses this way

Channel: Dyce Lab for Honey Bee Studies

Views: 227,801

Keywords: beekeeping, honey bee

Id: ZqTtdGuMLbo

Length: 22min 19sec (1339 seconds)

Published: Thu May 30 2019