Just wanted to share some cool video footage of a swarm that came out of one of my hives yesterday. It was actually a hive that had been split about 3 weeks ago from another hive. I was hoping they would make a new queen and stay in the new box. But it seems they had other plans. Strangely enough after swarming out of the hive I wasn’t sure what to expect to find in the original box. But upon inspection it seems there were still UN-hatched queen cells. Maybe the first queen that hatched decided not to kill the other Queens and stay, but preferred to take half to colony & swarm?
Anyway, the following videos are in order of the events as they took place.
Hi Ryan, you’re spot on with your assessment of what happened. It’s what I’ve been talking about trying to avoid over the last month or so. I take a split, then after the queen cells have developed, I split the split again to only about 2 frames of bees with just 1 frame of brood containing queen cells. I try to balance the population while taking into account the number of bees yet to emerge from the brood frame, plus maybe a second frame with emerging brood.
Wow, that is good to know that my assumptions make sense, and that I can make the best of the situation. So If all goes well I may end up with 3 new hives from 1.
Yes you’re spot on Ryan, you certainly can & if the spring weather holds, you can even go higher.
I split a bloke’s hive on the 1st of this month. The split was my fee. I comfortably made 3 nucs from that one split. Most of the brood was sealed which meant a huge population increase during the following 2 weeks, which I was able to use to bolster a couple of weaker hives on top of the 3 splits.
You can think of a single hive at the start of spring as a small snowball, then let it grow. It would be incredible to actually see how big the snowball would get at the end of a season if one was to focus wholly on growing that snowball, while ignoring honey production.
