The 10 Frame Split 🤞🏻
I'd like to become self sustainable when it comes to bees. If I can split hives to make increase that could end my need to buy bees every year. Also splitting bees is exciting. It's a fascinating to watch a hive establish itself, raise a new queen, and make increase before winter comes.
In this video we took a healthy overwintered Nuc and split it to make increase. It was surprising to see how active the queen had been, there was a ton of brood!
We took the queen out of the 10 frame brood box and moved her to a 4 frame nucleus box. To ensure she was well taken care of I added more bees, brood, and food. I'm pretty confident that that box will be fine - I tried my best to set her up for success.
The 10 frame box now contains an abundant amount of eggs, bees, and resources. Leaving a frame of eggs will allow that hive to raise it's own queen. If everything works out we should see eggs by July 16th!
Checking in a Week Later
It's a week later and I want to check on the status of the split. If a queen cell is present then we're good, the bees have moved into emergency queen rearing mode. If there is not a queen cell then we'll need to take another path to ensure the life of this hive.
GOOD NEWS! There was a bunch of queens capped cells present and more on the way. With the state of things I expect the hive to follow this timeline (Kudos to Bell Farm Iowa):
- 6/20 - Date of the Walk Away Split
- 7/2 - Virgin Queen Emerges
- 7/5 - Virgin Queen goes on orientation flights
- 7/6 - Virgin Queen goes on orientation flights
- 7/7-7/9 - Queen Mating Flights.
- 7/14 - Oxalic Acid Treatment Window
- 7/16 - Check Colony For Eggs
Looking at that schedule I will shoot to leave this hive alone until around the 14th. At that time I will attempt the Oxalic Acid Dribble Treatment. I'd like to get this hive slamming into winter with the lowest mite count possible.