Splitting the hives

On the weekend, we split two beehives...

...into four! (The first photo is from last summer. The second one, from Saturday,  shows that our lawn already needs mowing!!)

We had never split hives before, so our mentor William came over to give us a hand.

Here I am holding a frame of bees. I don't wear gloves anymore. They make it harder to manipulate frames, and they also make you more likely to squish a bee and then get stung by other bees offended by your intrusion!  And when a bee stings, she releases a scent that tells other bees the hive is in trouble. They come out to lend a hand, or stinger, in battle.

I also no longer get heart palpitations when I open a hive. I feel pretty calm and relaxed handling bees now, and the girls must sense that because I have yet to be stung at the hive after two years of doing this. I'm sure the day will come, but so far so good. I did get stung twice last year in my garden, and you can hardly blame a bee for stinging you when you step on her! Fortunately I'm not allergic to their venom. and I don't even get much of a reaction to stings;  just a brief period of pain which I don't find too bothersome. It's important to get the stinger out of your skin as quickly as possible after being stung, as the thing keeps pumping in venom even after it has detached from the bee's body!

Here's a hive with the pop topped off. This hive is doing great, lots of bees, brood and eggs, and a big laying queen that we finally found. Especially for a novice like me, it is NOT easy to spot a queen bee crawling amongst the masses of worker bees.

Some queens are duds who don't lay well or enough or at all. One of my two queens was small and William wants me to kill her later in the season and let the worker bees make a new queen. We'll see if I have the stomach for that!

Each of my hives had two deep boxes on it. The plan was to split each hive in half. Each original hive had one queen, but we needed four queens for four hives. So in each split, the queen went in one box, and we put a new queen in the other!

Here's William looking taking out a frame as I watch.

The first frame out of the box gets leaned up against the side of the hive. You have to be very careful not to knock it to the ground. I have not yet dropped a frame of bees, but it will not be pretty when I do. Bees do not like being dropped!

William brings over a new queen.

This little box is the queen cage. Inside it is a new queen with some worker bees to look after her. The whole at the end is plugged with candy. You can't just plop a new queen in the hive; the worker bees would immediately kill her as an intruder. They need a few days to get used to her scent. That's where the candy plug comes in. The bees eat their way through the candy, and by the time they and the queen can get out the hole, the other bees are used to the new queen's scent (they can smell and see her through the wire mesh.)

You have to poke a little hole in the candy to get them started.

The bees on the outside of the queen cage have flown over to investigate the new royalty! Bees are big on pheromones.

Now William makes a space between the frames to fit in the queen cage, wire side down:

Ta da! The queen is installed. Tomorrow I have to go make sure she has escaped. If she hasn't, I have to tear off the mesh and let her out. If you look at the picture, you can see some exposed larvae on the top of the centre frame. The bees had built "burr comb" between the upper and lower boxes, filling a bit of the gap. They laid eggs in there, which were developing into larvae. When we took the boxes apart, it broke open the burr comb.

We repeated this whole process with the other hive and voila, four hives:

In the process, I got rid of the beaten-up green boxes and replaced them with some better white boxes. As well, we had two different types of hives on the go: a Langstroth and a D. E. hive. In Europe you see all kinds of different hives, but in North America, everyone seems to use the Langstroth (with some exceptions.) We liked our D. E. hive better, but it has caused problems when working with William, who supplied our bees and has also given us frames of drawn comb (frames of wax that the bees have already draw out into hexagonal cells) and so on. Our D.E. hive isn't interchangeable with the Langstroth, which is what William uses. So for now, we are switching to all Langstroths. My ultimate goal is to use D.E. hives, which I like better. But we have enough of  a learning curve right now without worrying about hive complications!

There you go. Now you know how to split a beehive. Let's hope all four hives do well this summer and we get some lovely honey out of it all.

Be kind to honeybees! They are having a really hard time of it these days, and they are so important to our own survival.