Hive split fun!

[Charlie Garrott]

Yesterday, 5/12/2025, Debra came to help me with my hives. She is my instructor for the Journeyman Beekeeper class. It was time for my apiary inspection.

I just spent 10 days out of town and was firmly convinced that my one super active hive had swarmed and that my other hive was dying.

Debra helped me with a very complete inspection of all my hives. We discovered that the active hive had about 10 frames of brood, lots of eggs, and lots of food. I had put on a third deep box before I left town to give them some room to grow. We found the original marked queen. My fear of the bees having swarmed was settled. They were all home and happy!!!

In terms of the "dying" hive, we found that the activity I was seeing was bees from the big hive using the other hives in the yard as a grocery store. I had also put out three "swarm catcher" boxes in my apiary before I left town. There was some bee activity in these boxes.  They were calmly robbing any remaining resources from non-active hive boxes. Surprisingly to me, the robbing was not super intense as I have seen before, so the thought of robbing did not even occur to me. There was no brood or larvae in the inactive hives, so the only conclusion was that these hives were being robbed out.

I thought that I had two active hives with no queens. So, I drove down to Centralia and bought 2 Hawaiian Carniolan mated queens.

Debra helped me split the truly active hive into three single deep hives. We put the two purchased queens into the new split off hives. I left these two hives in my apiary. I did put pretty tight entrance restrictors on all three hives to encourage the bees to stay in their new homes and give them a better chance of protecting their colony. I need to go in on Friday (next warm day) and see how the new queens are doing and then go back a few days later to make sure they have left their cage and are starting to lay eggs.

We did put pollen patty strips into all three hives.

There were quite a few bees in the hives covered with pollen - likely from the scotch broom fields in my neighborhood.

By the way, last week I did an alcohol wash mite test on one frame of brood in the active hive. I only found 1 mite.

I made oxalic acid sponges earlier this season and am ready to put them in when more mites show up.

Right now, I am in the middle of building top feeder boxes for the hives in preparation for sugar syrup feeding in the upcoming dearth. 

Thanks to Debra for all her help and thanks to the OBA for being a great community for discussion and learning.

Charlie Garrott