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Author Topic: Splitting before springtime  (Read 972 times)

Offline TheFuzz

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Splitting before springtime
« on: August 26, 2020, 04:21:44 am »
Here in Australia, spring time is coming very soon, the weather is starting to become warm for it. I have been out of town during the last two months, and have only recently gotten home to do beekeeping.

I am aware that honeybees are prone to swarming during spring. A number of my hives are quite full of honey currently and I expect at least a few will want to swarm.

I checked my hives, and I expected that I'd be able to find queen cells, or some sign that the bees are going to swarm. However I haven't been able to find any obvious sign. In some of the hives, I have noticed that there's a lot of drone cells, alongside being quite a bit higher number of drones in general. Is this a sign that the hives are planning on swarming?

I'm unsure what I should do to prevent the hives from swarming. I'm under the impression that, if the bees want to swarm, they're going to do so, so the best thing I can do is create a split.

Should I be splitting the hives that are quite full, with lots of drone and drone cells, because they're likely to swarm? I presume if they're going to swarm, the hives will already have extra queens in it, so will I need to find a queen in the hive, and put it in with the split, or will it be fine to split a hive and leave them with extra queens?

When splitting a hive, how many frames of brood and eggs(with nurse bees covering it), will I need to provide the new split with? How many frames of honey would I need to provide the split with, and how much pollen do they need?

Offline Oldbeavo

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Re: Splitting before springtime
« Reply #1 on: August 26, 2020, 09:01:55 am »
First check how many frames of brood you have in each hive, are you running single or double brood box?
If you split before you have queen cells then the chance of swarming is reduced.
Where are your multi queens coming from? usually one per hive.

Offline TheFuzz

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Re: Splitting before springtime
« Reply #2 on: August 26, 2020, 11:21:20 pm »
Spring officially starts in September and it's already warm, so I presume that, if they were going to swarm, they would already have produced queen cells? And then if they have produced queen cells and are prepared to swarm, I would then presume the hive would have multiple queens?

I'm not using a queen excluder, the queens seem to use the first two boxs for brood. The hives seem to have a good amount of healthy brood in them, a bit more than usual, I'd have to go check and count to be able to give an exact number.

 

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