Help, trying to prevent a swarm

its much more dramatic looking than it is in reality. In reality the bees set to marching or flying back into the hive. Those that march end in up in the split- those that fly go home. This is exactly what happens in a swarm- the younger bees who have never been foragers yet go with the old queen and the foragers stay to look after the brood and the new queen cells. The bees are not angered or harmed. It’s the perfect thing to do if your hive already has queen cells and will swarm. Basically it mimics the swarm and enable you be sure you don’t lose the bees that swarm. The hives can be recombined later int he season if needs be. I would say the difficulty level is a 3 out of ten. If you can handle brood frames you can do a Taranov split.

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-I have been so preparing to do a split . I have no fear of the bees I take my hits but am all thumbs . I will read up more thanks.

I was waiting for the rest of the hive box to come because I have been studying on doing a split . We have had a few conversations. Finally got some money and I had no bottom board or inner cover. So I saw the swarm on my little swarm tree and I threw the box on 3 pieces of frame so there would be an entrance and so they are going in in several places. They did go in and this is them today. I would like to add one more super,

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This was the one that did not have room in the little cardboard NUC and it reswarmed , went to another low tree and I gave it to my friend because I do not have any boxes. Need to order all my stuff on line.!
I did get SHB bottom boards that work well so tackled that problem.

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We both have similar climate and I don’t use nuc boxes when I make a split. The split involves about 1/2 of everything in the hive and it goes straight into an 8 frame hive. That way the split that is queenless isn’t needing checking for 4 weeks and in that time a new queen has emerged, mated and laying eggs which help a lot in preventing the bees absconding after being disturbed.
Cheers

yep it was all I had so I realized and gave them to a friend. Take care.

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I ordered another box because I know I am going to need it. Do not want to get too big now up to 5 hives maybe 2 more :blush: :honeybee: :honeybee: :honeybee: :slight_smile:

Sounds good till you are handling them well and confident. Use the forum to get help, tips and advice,
Cheers

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I thought I’d update my situation with my bursting hive. No swarms which I thought were inevitable given the size of the population that survived winter. The hive has a huge population in the 5 deep boxes shown in the photograph I took this morning (2 deep brood, and 3 deep supers. 2 out of the 3 supers are full with mostly uncapped honey. I hope the capping crew gets busy so I can extract this batch soon!

Cheers,

G

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wow I cant even put my box back on mine. I can take it off but not raise it. Just thinking of not replacing one of the 2 boxes I just harvested. That is a monster.

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So far, so good. This monster hive has behaved itself. The nectar peak is past us and my last inspection a few days ago showed all three deep supers were full of honey. By inspections I could tell the bees filled the top super in 10 days, that’s 4 lbs a day. Is that possible?

Everything is still drying and was uncapped -except in the lower super.

There was a lot of new (white) wax on the top board telling me they still want to build. I removed 5 capped frames of honey from the white super, replacing them with empty drawn comb that needs repair. I installed some metal handles on the two top supers so I have a secure holding point to lift from. I’m hoping by end of July, everything will be mostly capped, then I’ll harvest.

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I’ve had a very good year from this hive. It produced 211 lbs / 96 kg of honey this year. Very excellent stuff. Into feeding mode now.

Gerry

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