BEEKEEPING: Is My Hive Ready to Split?

When is a hive ready to split? How much brood should it have? How many frames of bees? In this video, we check out a hive that is ready to split and quickly review how to make a split!

[@TerryRichard-x2i]

I have 57 colonies and I’m getting 31 queens from you this Friday. My plan is to make sure I have all eggs and larvae at the bottom and a good honey frame with two more drawn comb. All at the bottom. Place everything else especially extra honey on top Q E. Then when I get myqueens on Friday I’m gonna put my push in cages that all ready to go in on hopefully emerging brood frames

[@TerryRichard-x2i]

My hives had 4or 5 frames of brood 2weeks ago

[@TerryRichard-x2i]

Or would you do an Ian steppler style split. 4brood exc, shake everything down put everything else above q e ?

[@thebeesupply]

I recommend just making sure each split has an equal quantity of brood, honey and bees. And, I like brood of all stages.

[@sj6404]

If you do this without a queen, won't the new hive just make a queen?

[@thebeesupply]

They will try, but the success rate isn't always great and you don't know what the genetics of the new queen will be. However, walk away splits are common and easy! You just have to realize that 25-50% of them won't successfully raise a new queen.

[@TerryRichard-x2i]

Can you please make one video show me “when and what you gonna do if your queens for splits are gonna be here on Friday Are gonna worry at all about dividing young nurse bees so that both queens get nurse bees and also make sure forager bees stay with older queens?

[@microbiologycory10]

I don’t think this level of detail is necessary or feasible (especially not for 50 hives), nurse bees will naturally be split with brood frames as they’re already on them.

[@thebeesupply]

I usually prefer a mix of brood of all stages in each split.

[@TerryRichard-x2i]

So I give more resources to my new split because she won’t have many nurse bees or foragers.

[@microbiologycory10]

We can see your bottom boxes but, is it true you don’t want to split a single brood box, you’d want to add brood boxes until you have a couple deep prior to splitting so you don’t go into winter with a several weaker hives?

[@thebeesupply]

You can split a single brood box, you just want to make sure it has at least 6 frames of brood and is full of bees.

[@cavazosjonathan69]

HELP!!! I missed it with my one hive. I come to find that my hive swarmed 3 times that I know of and was able to get 2 out of the 3 but with closer inspection I removed 6 queen cells and 4 of them had hatched and two were about to hatch.

[@thebeesupply]

Sorry! We'd recommend just letting those queen cells hatch and let the hive finish raising a new queen. If the hive still has a lot of bees, add a box to help reduce the swarming tendency.

[@TerryRichard-x2i]

I have 57 colonies and I’m getting 31 queens from you this Friday. My plan is to make sure I have all eggs and larvae at the bottom and a good honey frame with two more drawn comb. All at the bottom. Place everything else especially extra honey on top Q E. Then when I get myqueens on Friday I’m gonna put my push in cages that all ready to go in on hopefully emerging brood frames

[@TerryRichard-x2i]

My hives had 4or 5 frames of brood 2weeks ago

[@thebeesupply]

Sine it's spring and hives grow fast, they are probably about ready to split at this point!