Hi all,
I found a a website recently that described a swarm prevention method that I’ve never heard of. Was wondering whether anyone has tried an overnight split?
It’s for those, like me, who haven’t seen their queen since you put her in.
So what you do is, do a normal split where you take 4 frames out, but shake the bees off into the hive you’re removing them from.
Then put a queen excluder on your existing hive (where you just removed the frames from and shook the bees into), and put the brood box with your shaken frames on top.
Leave it overnight, and the nurse bees will go up through the excluder, but your queen stays down and then you remove the top brood box and set it up as your new hive.
Yes, shaking bees off of frames into the lower boxes and then adding an excluder is a valid method of ensuring you aren’t moving the queen unintentionally when you cannot find her.
It can also be done when donating a frame of brood with nurse bees to another hive when you definitely don’t want to move the queen.
i haven’t heard of that method of making a split but it would sure work as long as some of the four frames you move up have eggs or tiny larvae to start making a new queen. But you’d have to remove the top box after only a day or so as otherwise the bees might not start making a queen- sensing the original queen below- and after a few days all the eggs and larvae would be too old. In that case you have to add another frame of eggs later or a new bought queen…
another option would be to add a super between the two boxes with qx’s and an upper entrance for the top box. They would likely make a queen, whilst sharing the middle super with the hive at the bottom and you’d end up with a two queen single hive. You could remove the top hive or recombine it later in the season… killing the old queen perhaps.
It will work providing you have eggs and really young larvae in the top box so the bees can produce a new queen. That method has been around for a long time. More time consuming than a ‘walk away’ and both methods are relying on eggs in both splits in the brood that doesn’t have a queen.
Cheers
When I’m looking for an unmarked queen I look for a bee on the move, she will be heading off the frame to shade while worker bees are happy to continue working.
It’s great we can’t catch Corona 19 from bees, you stay safe mate. Look forward to catching up when we can.
Cheers
Yes it works especially if you want the queen to remain in the original hive and you get the nurse bees only on the frames the next morning to start a nuc.
I also use this if doing a vertical split and also want the orig queen to be at the bottom then move those frames above and on top of a splitboard.