I had been watching the weather and waiting all week. I finally decided that Friday afternoon would be the big day. We were going to split our hive!!
I planned to have things ready the day before but that didn't happen. But thanks to my helpers we were able to do it all in no time.
This was the hardest part of the whole thing. It's best to put a split into a tiny hive that just holds a few frames. The bees won't have much to defend and they are close together to keep warm. This tiny hive is called a "nuc". Short for nucleus.
I bought one called EZ Nuc that came folded flat and you put it together. No fasteners or anything, just folding. Well the EZ part was a big lie. There were no printed instructions and I'd only seen an assembled nuc one time so there was no way I could just wing it from memory.
You Tube to the rescue! LB did this mostly by herself with me running the video and pausing, stopping, pausing, stopping, and directing.
BEAUTIFUL!!
3 of my kids were helping me with this. Problem is that we don't have enough gear for 4 people. So some of them didn't have everything they needed. I tried to keep them off the front lines, so to speak, but finally had to excuse one of them because he was too afraid. Having the right gear makes a world of difference so I'm going to need to get some more so my kids will feel more comfortable around them.
~So here's what we did.....
1. Into the nuc went 2 frames of bees with lots of brood and larvae. I couldn't find any queen cells to add, which was too bad.
2. Then 2 frames of honey so they will not have to go out to forage and can spend more time making a new queen.
3. The last frame was empty drawn out comb.
4. I took 2 more frames of bees and brushed them down into the nuc so the brood would have plenty of nurse bees.
We closed the lid and moved it across the yard.
I may have made a mistake in including 2 frames of honey instead of 1 plus a frame of pollen and nectar. But it was a lot easier on paper than getting in there and actually doing it. If I lose this nuc, I'll try again.
That done, I had to make some decisions about our strong hive. Problem was that there were SO many bees that I couldn't see anything very clearly and certainly couldn't find the queen anywhere. I want her on the bottom but she had been laying in all 3 boxes. How do I get her back down?
What I finally decided was to run my excluder over the bottom and hope for the best. But then I slept on it. And no. I has to be changed. Because if she's in the top super there's no way for her to get back down. So talked with my bee people and decided to do a "walk away split".
I'll take off the top 2 supers and put on a bottom board then add feeder lids to both. It'll mean running a double brood chamber on one hive. It also means that if all my splits are successful, I'll have made 3 splits from one hive. Which at this point seems just fine since it's so early in the year and my hive looks fantastic.
That'll wait until next week because of cooler temps headed our way. By then, things might look different anyway.
One more thing....
This is my external feeder I made to feed my split. Just a shallow plastic dish with lots of sticks, rocks, and pine cones for the bees to land on so they won't drown. I'm feeding a 1:1 sugar syrup. As you can see, they are pretty happy with it!
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