Splitting With Swarm Cells

hey justin dyson here at dyson apiaries um out of the friends house today they thought they saw some swarm sales a week ago and they actually came over and helped me a few minutes with some splits i was doing i ran over here and looked and i found some interesting things here that i think can uh can help some of you out so stick right with us [Music] so winning this hive is a double deep configuration i've set the top deep off and when we lifted the the top deep we found swarm sails on the bottom found a few that were capped um it's supposed to rain tomorrow so we had a little bit of grace but i guarantee you the hive in this situation with cap queen sails would probably hit the trees um the day after the rain passes um so we got to take some action here uh it's it's too far gone in my opinion to to try to use some other swarm management techniques and honestly they would like to kind of increase their numbers a little bit and we have a great opportunity to do that so there's a couple things we can do if this were my apiary and and they've kind of gave me free will here to kind of do what i think is best but i would actually make two full hive splits because this hive is is good and strong i mean they have brewed across six seven eight frames in both boxes i mean of course they're not all full but queen can't possibly lay more than a ten frame box i get that but um there there is ample brood in both boxes i'm going to kind of do a blended method of what's called a false swarm and we're going to make two splits um so i've already found the queen here on this frame and also on this frame is a nice pretty sealed queen cell so i have the old queen and what i'm gonna what i'm gonna end up doing is making kind of two equal splits here and i'm gonna make sure that both colonies have uh a couple good frames of honey left in them and then several good frames of uh of brood and maybe a uh maybe an empty frame or two but then i'm gonna leave each of those colonies a good ripe sealed queen cell in both of them and i'm gonna tear the rest of them down i may leave two in each one just to be safe and then i'm gonna take this old queen and i'm gonna put her over here in a nuke box with a few bees um and kind of keep her keep her on standby and this is kind of a false swarm method but i'm modifying it by actually making a split over here and the reason i'm saving this old queen is because we're still it's the end of march um we can still we can get queens now um out of the south and a few in north carolina here and there if you if if you got a local breeder or something it may spare one it's still kind of hard to get those in this area right now unless you order from the south so when we do this when we do this split i'm gonna leave a queen cell in both of these and that's gonna shut them down from swarming because i'm not gonna leave a bunch of queen cells well it may happen that one of those queen cells fails or one of those queens goes out the mate doesn't make it back for mating so we still have this old queen setting here in this in this nuke box and you know hopefully at least one of them is successful if both of them are successful great we got a little nuke running and we can you know keep that old queen running or we could move her on down the road it doesn't matter but um these two colonies would end up with two young queens but if one of them fails and we're just about to go into the to the nectar flow if one of those fails we can simply take that old queen and we can merge that nuke back with that colony that the queen failed in and at that point we're still going to make honey with that colony so that's kind of the goal so what we're going to do is just kind of go through this colony and uh we're going to find two good ripe queen cells to leave in each box and we're going to kind of balance them up now this is a situation where we don't have another apiary multiple miles away to take the bees to so we're actually going to have to kind of modify it a little more um with their current set up here we can kind of split the difference with the hives and keep the field force coming into both hives a little bit or we can just put way more bees in the one that's going to set in a new location here because you know all those field bees are going to go back i'm probably going to choose the method to kind of split the difference because of the way the hive stand is here but just keep that in mind if you're going to make a split here and you're going to set the new hive here you need to put way more bees in this in this colony here because a lot of those are going to go back home um and as soon as we get done with the split there's still plenty of bees here we can uh we can go ahead and get rid of the uh the uh the mic treatment and probably go ahead and super because we're about two weeks from flow starting and these these bees are gonna need some room so that's kind of where we're at and we're gonna go ahead and kind of work through them here so right here is frame um i think i think this was frame two i took out frame one here it's full of honey um going to frame two we still have eggs larva good number of bees got a couple queen cells there and um once we get on the frame three we have good seal brood um more sealed brood more sealed brood like i said they have a lot of brood in this colony we're definitely in good shape more sealed brood and then we have uh looks like a couple frames of foundation well one frame foundation and then a frame of honey so what we'll do is we'll go ahead and set this we'll go ahead and set this box up i'm gonna set these aside for a minute so that's a good frame of honey right here probably some pollen in it yep so a good frame of honey and pollen so this split this top box is is good with honey on that end i'm gonna go ahead and put um let's go ahead and set up another bottom board here so i know what i'm doing i'm gonna set this queen over here in this nuke for right now there's a good queen cell on there that i don't want to damage so i want to be careful with that frame um we kind of got caught caught off guard here so we're going to makeshift the bottom board until they can get another one tomorrow which will be just fine these living trees they don't have to have perfect equipment so we just kind of did a little makeshift bottom board here and i'm going to go through and i'm going to leave them just one or two good queen cells that one's not very far along yeah there is a there's a really good queen sale um right there that's a great one to leave it's drawn out good it was probably well fed um there's more up here and i know i already have another good one on this frame over here so i'm gonna leave this is my frame that i'm gonna choose for this colony to make themselves a new queen there's two of them yep yeah there's another one over here and and this is a great opportunity here this is one you could actually cut out if you wanted if you wanted to split that off into another one um you could take a knife and kind of run him running behind it and uh kind of show you how i would do that you can kind of cut in behind it make sure you give some good margins there and you don't get into the queen sales royal jelly and just like that got herself another queen cell that you could use for another colony it's important not to shake these queen cells around because you really don't know the age of them um and that larva can if it's still in the larva stage right after it's capped it can fall away from the uh from the royal jelly and and it won't survive so we're going to leave we're going to leave that nice pretty sale right there and one other one on this frame and hopefully with just a couple cells left they'll decide not to swarm again a little smoke shake a few of those bees off there and just make sure i don't have a bunch more queen cells on there because i like i said i don't want to leave them tons and tons of queen cells because if i do they will uh they'll swarm again so i'm just kind of going through and killing off those swarm sails because i already have a really good one i really have a couple really good ones over on another frame so again just getting rid of those queen cells they're everywhere it's how i was ready to swarm so i already know where the queen's at um i'm gonna jump into this colony here or or this what's about to be its own colony anyway um good little frame foundation they're working on there this frame is full of eggs had a queen cell there i just tore it up taking the frames apart now if you came into this colony you saw the side chewed out of some queen cells there's already a virgin has emerged so that's something to look for as well like i was talking about i'm gonna put a few extra bees over here so they can continue to cover all that all that brood because a lot of these field bees are gonna come back over here because this colony is kind of in the original spot we kind of split the difference a little bit but there'll still be some drift back we'll put one more shake over here it's kind of the light shake another frame of brood another big old queen seal right there i've already shook that frame so i'm going to dispatch that one now remember we have another colony to deal with over here so we need to make sure they get a little love so i'm going to put a frame here it's got some honey on it um i don't even have to put any brood in this nuke because the queen's in there they got an old queen so empty frame will do um just make sure they have uh make sure they have some resources because they're gonna be a really small and kind of weak colony and uh we don't want to they're not going to be able to forage as much i need to find this this queen on this frame here and i can't i've got good queen cells on the bottom of this um frame so i want to salvage those for this parent hive she's here somewhere there she is i think they were wanting to mark her so i'm gonna hold on to her for this hold this frame she has already shrunk down it's coming look how small she is all that brood in that colony look how small she is she's ready to fly you got to be careful sometimes with queens when they get this size because that because they can fly these queens get this size they can uh they can take wing i'm gonna go ahead and put a little dial on her and get her on that frame that i put in there all right so now you got that frame here's a good frame of honey i'm gonna put this frame of honey with this colony over here because they don't have any yet so now we have a good frame of honey left on that colony and that's good of course we got the queen cells right here we have one two one two capped on this side and then two or three open so i'm gonna do away with those open sails and just leave them two cap sails there in hopes that they go with it i'm not going to shake this frame because it's got a queen cells on it that i don't know the age of foundation frame will be just fine right there they'll draw that out and another frame of honey that's good i'm actually going to give this frame over here to this one i gotta see where that queen's at so now i kind of have decent setup here that's a good frame of honey to leave now this is how it has a frame of honey on each side this one is foundation but it's got a lot of honey on it so i'm gonna put it in this one now one additional thing i'm gonna do to try to keep them because they're still strong um still got a lot of bees in there um i'm gonna give them a little something to do with some foundation here i'm gonna drop a frame in here this is kind of called checkerboarding in a way i'm not gonna do it all the way across though just gonna put a couple there that'll really that'll give them that'll give them something to do and i'm gonna leave this frame over on the side over here so we'll go ahead and put this apa bar back in here for now and when they decide to super they can pull these off they got a little bit of room now they got something to do and they're going to get a brood break too which is great for mic control i don't have to touch this because i don't have my gloves on now go ahead that one is done give me a little smoke they get a little stirred up now we've been in here a while so that split is done like i say we did a little makeshift bottom board there but they'll be alright for a day or two we have an extra queen cell here if we needed one for another colony um been out there a little while now but um kind of the same goes for this one i'm gonna go ahead and get this colony back together we got a couple good queen cells in there and good amount of brood good amount of bees some of those bees from that colony is going to drift back over here this colony here just for what we're doing with it we're just going to leave them as a two frame they got good honey um they got plenty of honey in here and i want to see where that queen's at i might have ran up on the side yeah she's over there on the side they got a good amount of honey they actually have zero brood in this colony which is fine it's okay um but she's that queen's still laying right now and we're just gonna fill this out with foundation for now um i'm not gonna put that in there we need to fix that but we can fix that later so this colony here now we have the old queen with no brood you could put some brood in there but old queen no brood a split and a split um i put a few extra bees in here because this is kind of a kind of a new location so a few extra bees some of those are going to drift back a couple good cap queen cells couple good cat queen cells both colonies those queens are going to emerge and i don't know how old they are but you know probably five days or less they're going to emerge they'll go out to mate hopefully they both get back if one of them doesn't we still have the old queen here we can reinstall in one of these and keep going both these colonies will make honey this year um there we still have really three weeks before the main nectar flow starts and there's a lot of brood to emerge there so um these colonies will still be in good shape and hardly miss a beat so that's what i would do in this situation for what it's worth so thanks for watching you

Channel: Dyson Apiaries

Views: 30,900

Keywords: beekeeping, nc beekeeping, swarm, splitting a hive, how to split a hive, how do i split a hive, false swarm, what do i do if my hive is about to swarm, splitting a hive from swarm cells

Id: D_gouiiIJ28

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 09 2022