Springtime is swarm season! My colony is healthy and growing with lots of eggs, brood and drones. Charmaine is still going strong. She’s been our queen for 4 months now! While I’d love to just let the colony get bigger and bigger, as Bee Guru reminded me, “If you do not split the hive, they will split themselves.”

When a colony begins to outgrow its hive, the queen will sense that the hive is getting cramped. She will leave the hive and half of the bees will follow her in search of a new home. This is a bee swarm. You often hear of people freaking out about a bee swarm, but the fact is that a swarm is not dangerous and they rarely attack. They have no home to defend. They are just an exhausted group of homeless bees and their queen, looking for a new place to build their hive. If you ever find a swarm, do not swat, spray, or otherwise harm them. Call your local beekeepers association and they will be happy to come and collect the bees.

Swarming is how colonies reproduce. The bees that remain in the original hive will raise a new queen and the process starts again. Make a queen, build up the colony, swarm, repeat. Which makes for lots and lots of bees.

So. My colony is building up nicely and if I don’t split my hive, they will split themselves. Beekeepers will manually split hives to simulate a swarm, which hopefully prevents the colony from swarming and keeps all the bees right where we want them, in our hives. As a responsible beekeeper, I need to do my part to manage swarming. While swarming is a natural thing for a colony, I live in a neighborhood with a high school nearby. I do not want my girls to swarm off and bother people or build a hive in an inconvenient location for my neighbors. Ok ok, time to do a split!

You know I’m a newbee and I’m kinda doing this whole beekeeping thing with a try and see approach. I’ve been working up my plan to split them for several weeks now, but finally did it. There are a lot of different ways to split a hive, but I did what’s called an overnight split. Yesterday I pulled 2 frames of brood, including new eggs, and shook off all the bees. Well most of the bees, some of them were very resistant. But after checking that the queen was not on these frames, I put them in a new box with empty frames. I did the same with 2 frames of honey and pollen. Then I put this box on top of the existing hive with a queen excluder separating them. And then replaced the frames I took with empty frames for the established colony to start building on. Closed the hive up and waited until today.

Yesterday these frames had almost no bees on them. Today when I opened the hive, they had been covered by nurse bees to tend to the brood. I know the queen is not among them because I used the queen excluder. I then moved this box to its new location, next to the old hive, which was also moved a few inches to the left. The new small colony will hopefully get started raising a new queen. I’ll know in about a month if they were successful, if they have new eggs. If not, I will take a frame of eggs from the established hive and give it to them so they can try again. This is a huge reason for wanting two separate hives.

My husband built a new hive stand as well. The legs are sitting in PVC cap pieces and those are full of soapy water. They will keep any crawling bugs from reaching the hive.

I observed the two hives for a while to see what the bees would do. After a bit of drama due to fighting over a syrup feeder, things appear to have calmed down and I think they’re going to figure things out. Returning foragers have a moment of “hey things are different” before finding their hive and going inside with their goodies. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m doing my best, and thankfully the girls do know what they’re doing. The new hive doesn’t have foragers yet, but will soon enough.

So I now have two hives, a strong established hive and a much smaller queenless hive. I’m excited to see what happens!

Speaking of not knowing what I’m doing, I’m hoping to improve that situation by attending actual Bee College next weekend at the University of Florida. UofF has their own bee lab and apiary and they host a weekend of beekeeping classes for aspiring, new and experienced beekeepers. I’m excited to learn from the experts.

Oh I also added a watering station for the bees. Bees need water too! Good luck girls, I hope you all have a queen soon! 🐝