I made my first nuc today from #5, I cut a follower board to change a regular eight bar warre box into a three frame nuc, then I went through #5 looking for the queen and a suitable frame of capped brood, having found both I put the frame of brood with all its bees, plus a frame of honey with all its bees into the nuc space then I added an empty frame and the queen. Closed it all up with a feeder and some sugar water (next week is all rain). The whole process probably took me two hours, most of which was just going through all the frames in two boxs looking for the queen. Dividing by box is much faster but I want #5 to produce honey this year so I though I would try this.
Now what should happen is the old hive should realize they are queenless and start raising a new queen from some just hatched eggs, the new queen should be working in about 28 days give or take a few days, this puts us at the end of may and beginning of june, there will be plenty of drones by then for a well mated queen.
#5 was the only one big enough so far for me to do this with, by the end of may I should have three more done the same way.
#1 is showing a nice increase in population (from outside observation alone).
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5 comments:
Sam,
Sounds great to do your first split of the season. Three frames, I did 5 frames mid March, but we are in the south. Tell them bees to get started on that queen.
Lost a 4-5 pound swarm from our biggest hive yesterday, but think they might be in a swarm trap!
I could have done more there were a lot of bees, I didn't want to set them back to much since I want some honey from them this year, I figure that this would be the earliest I could make nucs for our climate
I want to split a hive this year too. When we went to the Bee Symposium, Doug Vincent said that he noticed queens from August over wintered well. Not sure if that is specific to this locale, but we had a queen who was born around August last year and she has done well. We are going to try to time it that way again.
2 hours? See, I really do have so much more to learn about beekeeping. One thing that kept me from working my hives more often was being told I shouldn't spend more than 15 minutes inside the hive. I was always so conscious of that so when my frames became more sticky and harder to manipulate I grew fearful of spending more time on them.
Good luck with the split! I hope all goes well.
It was a warm sunny day so I wasn't worried about the bees getting chilled, the reason it took so long was I was looking for the queen and she was in the last box I checked. My goal for my hives is to only do an invasive brood inspection on two occasions, the first would be if I wanted to make a nuc, the other would be if a simple inspection (couple of frames at the ends of a box) showed a problem that needed further investigation. I'm considering doing a whole box split of one of my other hives just for comparison.
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