The Box with Too Many Bees

Published: 2023-07-29 8:05 PM

Category: Beekeeping | Tags: split, summer, management

Beekeeping stories keep on coming this month it seems.

During my inspection a little over a week ago, one of my boxes was out of space. Bees had begun storing nectar and pollen down in the brood nest, which leaves less space for the queen to lay eggs, which means a less productive hive overall. They had plenty of space above the brood chamber, but since we're after the summer solstice, they tend to not make much wax, even if conditions are good for building comb. So, the only option I had was to do a midsummer split.

The Honey Bee Research Center from the University of Guelph saves the day again. Their fantastic YouTube library has a video showing multiple methods for splitting. I don't have a queen handy, so I did a so-called "walkaway split," where I isolated the queen in the bottom box and moved some of the eggs, open larvae, and capped larvae up into an upper brood chamber. The bottom box got some empty frames of drawn comb to replace the ones I took out.

At dusk, nurse bees moved up into the top chamber to care for the developing bees. The next day, I took the top box off, which is essential its own colony now with the hope that after being queenless for 24 hours, they would build queen cells and begin rearing a new queen.

I'd never done this before so late in the season, but there are still plenty of drones around to mate with a potential queen, so I decided to go for it.

After four days, I checked the hive again and, much to my delight, there were three new queen cells with some very fat larvae that will develop into new queen bees.

When the queens emerge, one will kill the other two before going on her mating flight. If all goes well, I'll have a colony with a mated queen in the next two weeks. If all doesn't go well - she doesn't mate successfully, for instance - the colony can always be combined back with the original to get through the winter before trying a split again in the spring.