You MUST ensure that this frame has fresh, unhatched eggs. After a few days, place another frame from the same hive into the nuc. The nurse bees will not leave the brood to rejoin the main colony. So you have one frame in the nuc with plenty of nurse bees. These dividers are available for Langstroth hives at online retailers. As the colony grows, the divider can be moved to give the bees more room to work. Top bars have a solution in the form of a divider that fits snugly along the shape of the top bar, keeping out pesky unwanted hive interlopers because the bees only have enough room to work and defend themselves. Top bars are long and have much more room than a new colony can defend, just like a regular deep hive body has too much room. Meanwhile, I learned a trick from top-bar hive beekeeping to adapt to the Langstroth hive. We aren’t friends yet, but I’ll figure it out. I recently became acquainted with plastic nucs. I typically take one frame of mostly capped brood and place it in the nuc. You’ll need all of it: bee suit, smoker, hive tool, frame grip, bee brush. I’m assuming here that since you have a hive, you also have all of the necessary safety and beekeeping equipment. A blind split is just the normal, everyday split. Bearding is the signal to start the process to create two hives from one.įor me, there are two ways of making splits, blind and observed. Drawing on a comic strip analogy, Gallant will prevent swarming habit by creating this split, while Goofus will have swarms all over the neighborhood squatting in the void spaces of neighbors’ homes.Īn example of a crowded hive that’s ready to be split. To stave off swarming, simply make a split of the queen cells in the hive. A hive can swarm more than once in a season, and each time there is a huge loss of resources for the hive. Swarming bees fill themselves to the brim with honey before they leave. In fact, it demonstrates poor bee management for a beekeeper to allow a hive to get to the point where it will swarm. In nature, a colony swarms, but this is not such a good thing for beekeepers. Beekeepers have learned to capitalize on this predisposition towards colony-level reproduction in the form of creating a split. In nature, once a colony reaches certain relative point of development where it’s situated, the queen will gather some of her troops and go forth into nature as a swarm. If you have one hive, you can very easily make another one. Congratulations! Now what? If your hive has grown healthily and you are starting to see some bearding around the entrance, it may be time to make a split.īeehives, much like plants, can be vegetatively propagated. So, you want to become a beekeeper and you’ve got your hive. Now retired from PVAMU and enjoying his bees and family. My beekeeping mentor, Cecil Fry, in situ at his Hempstead, Texas farm.
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