Good day team.
I hope you are all well. We are almost to April and i am getting itchy for the bee yard!
On a recent warm day we cracked open a hive to check stores and at quick glance to how some sugar in, I have strong signs of life and I believe we t get a a candidate for a spring split…so long as it makes it that long.
Anyway, this hive has been extremely aggressive, and I wonder when/if I split it should I nip that in the bud and buy a queen in hopes of getting some calmer bees? I have not done a split before but my preference would be to let the girls produce one, however I don’t like the current temperament. (I really don’t care about cost of queen my main concern is the hive’s aggressiveness)
what are your thoughts? Coach me up. What is your criteria when planning a split if you will buy a queen or let them make a queen?
Thank you in advance for your considerations.
There are plenty of methods to make splits, with varying degrees of complexity and success. In your case, with overly defensive behaviour I’d go for replacing the original queen and introducing a new queen with known gentle genetics from a reputable queen producer.
If you let them produce their own queen, you get more of the same behaviour and potentially worse if the local drones carry the mean gene.
Here’s a simple method that has worked for me for years:
When the mother colony is strong with plenty of capped brood and you have the two new queens, find and kill the existing queen, divide frames of brood and food between two boxes along with frames of foundation/drawn comb, introduce the new queens in the queen cages with the candy exposed. Shake plenty of nurse bees into the new hive. Close up the hives and check in a few days that the queens have been released. The field bees will return to the original hive position and the new hive will have their own field bees soon enough.
By halving the population in each hive, the aggressive behaviour will likely reduce immediately and by the time they expand, the new genetics will be dominant.
Mike
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Thank you Mr Mike. I appreciate the suggestion and thought behind it.