Bees often swarm to the same spot (having left markers behind), so this fellow really has it made - he has his own little colony production service going, and he even made a dedicated box that fits right over the particular branch they swarm to - that’s how often they do it!īut here at the Manse that’s not how it works. We do have one beekeeping acquaintance whose bees do just that - they go to a nearby little fruit tree and all he does is shake them into a box and put them in a new hive.
You really have to catch them before this happens, because unless you are lucky and they swarm to a nearby low-hanging branch or something, they just… leave. If the bees have made it through the winter (always a source of anxiety when you live where we do), when things start warming up and the plants start to produce pollen, you can be pretty sure the bees will start to think about swarming.
#Bee hive split free
On the other hand, if they are getting so big for the hive that they want to do this, and if you manage it, you essentially have free bees! You can take that developing new queen and some of the bees and set them up in a new hive - getting yourself two hives for the price of one, which is a pretty sweet deal, let me tell you! (The colony is the bees relating to the queen. The one thing you do not want is for your bees to decide they need a new queen and start making their plans to swarm away! (This post has lots of pics and also VIDEOS - very short, as I personally get impatient - they are below.) Every once in awhile you pull the brood frames out and give them a little look. So the beekeeper sets himself the task of checking the brood, to see if the laying is going well, but also to see if there are these larger cells developing.
The queen is quite a bit larger than other bees, and her cell that she starts out in is also quite a bit bigger. They just go on laying their eggs in the ordinary way, but at this point they direct some of them for this other function. They do this by making some of their brood into different kinds of cells called queen cells. So the bees lay eggs and hatch new bees (their eggs are called brood)… but at a certain point, if the colony gets pretty large, there’s another way they can reproduce: they split the colony, making two colonies from one, and swarming. Sometimes the Chief does this to me - passes off some ancient knowledge as his own, and even after almost 37 years of marriage I’m still all “he’s so smart.” But then, it is smart to read - and remember - Aristotle, and also to keep your girlfriend interested.) (I thought this was a super insight by the Chief but the other day I read that Aristotle had made this observation. You have bees, right? You should get some.īees are individual little creatures, but their colony can be thought of as an organism unto itself. I’m going to explain to you what that means and why you do it.
A couple of weeks ago the Chief split the beehive.
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