When should I split my beehive?
Splitting a beehive brings amount many benefits such as swarm control and gives you the ability to offset your beekeeping hobby by selling nucleus colonies. However, making splits at the wrong time of the year can create issues that can set your colonies back. In this blog, I will discuss when is best to make splits and why making splits early is better than trying to battle through making splits later in the year.
Why do I need to split my beehive?
The major benefit of splitting a beehive throughout the season is that it alleviates swarm pressure on the colony. Make a split at the right time and the colony can ease its way through the worst of the swarming period. Making splits for sale is also an excellent way to offset the cost of your beekeeping hobby. Overwintered nucs for sale are at their most valuable during April and May, so making splits to ensure they can get through the winter period is critical to the success of your apiary and your wallet.
How to split a beehive?
There are many ways to split a beehive but if you are making up nucs with a specific intention to sell them, we recommend adding a mated queen (that you can buy HERE). The reason for this is that you want to give your resources (brood and stores) the very best chance of forming a fully functional nucleus colony. If you risk this to the mating of a queen, then if it fails, you need to start all over again.
Check out the guide on our website - https://www.blackmountainhoney.co.uk/guides/how-to-split-a-beehive
Here is the method that I use to making nucleus colonies for sale - https://www.blackmountainhoney.co.uk/bee-nucs-for-sale
When can I split a beehive?
You can safely split your beehive any time between April and September as long as you have at least 7-8 frames of brood available. You can split with fewer frames of brood but you can run the risk of leaving either side of the split or nucs, with insufficient resources to be able to manage themselves properly. For us in North Wales, a colony should be filling the brood box and provide sufficient frames of brood to make splits from the end of April onwards, weather dependent.
Why is it best to make splits early?
Making splits early in the season has a number of advantages over later season splits:
Feeding: When making early season splits, it’s important to feed your colonies especially when making smaller splits. This could be seen as a disadvantage for me, it’s a huge benefit for one simple reason. Feeding colonies with 1:1 sugar syrup, turbo charges the queens laying which means the nucs can build up very fast; however, you can feed colonies early in the season without having to worry wasps/robbing behaviour. This gives your nucs an uninterrupted chance to grow to a size where they can defend themselves adequately from any effects from wasps/robbing bees.
Wasps: Wasps can be a nuisance at any time of the year but they can completely decimate small splits and colonies towards the back end of the season. For us, any time from July onwards, smaller splits are at risk of being overrun by wasps. If you are making splits, paying good money for queens, the very last thing you want is a collapsed colony due to wasps. Early splits allow the colonies to build up to a point where they can defend themselves against wasps by the point they become a real problem. The same can be said for Asian Hornets! Eek.
Robbing: In a similar fashion to the above, by making splits early the splits can build up to a point where they can defend themselves through any periods of dearth. Instead of being robbed, they will probably be the ones doing the robbing. Making splits late in the year leaves the colonies vulnerable to robbing from stronger colonies as they don’t have enough bees to defend themselves properly.
Resources: Making splits earlier in the year is a very efficient use of resources. Although the donor colonies won’t be quite as big, because the wasp/robbing pressure is non-existent, you can make up two frame splits (1 x brood and 1 x stores) and feed them hard until they start to build up. This means you can split a single colony into 4-5 nucs quite easily which really helps when you are expanding your apiary. Try making a 2 frame split in August and watch how quickly your bees are robbed by bees or wasps:
Build Up: When making splits, the aim is, whatever time of the year you make them, to get them to build up to a point where they are strong enough to successfully overwinter. By making early splits, even when they are small, you are giving the bees the absolute maximum amount of time to build up. If done early enough, it’s quite possible to further split your splits if you constantly feed and add in mated queens when making future splits.
Swarm Management: Finally, an often overlooked benefit of taking an early split from your colonies of bees is that, if you let them requeen naturally via the emergency impulse, you help the bees to navigate the swarming period without losing lots of bees. Its effectively used as an artificial swarm process to pre-emptively allow the colony to swarm, via a proactive split. It helps reduce the amount of bees in your neighbours chimneys and ultimately leads to a more profitable beekeeping operation as the bees are likely to recover to deliver a decent honey crop
Conclusion
Since we started making splits early in the season, our beekeeping operation has been so much more efficient and we have been able to expand and a much faster rate. Our expansion rate has increased but more importantly, our overwintering failure rate has reduced and rarely exceed 5% and these are mostly due to drone laying queens. If you are making splits early in the season and require queens for introduction, you can buy them HERE - https://www.blackmountainhoney.co.uk/buyqueenbees
