Bee hive split how to#

Once the eggs hatch into larvae, the workers provide a special gland food, a royal jelly, which triggers the development of queen like characteristics, including fully developed ovaries and glands for producing queen pheromones.Īs the queen develops, the cells are capped and within 72 hours of capping a swarm issues.Ībout one week prior to swarming, the queen is prepped for flight, workers feed her less resulting in reduced egg laying, thus her abdomen diminishes in weight so that she can fly with the swarm. Workers tend to build cells along the edges and bottoms of the comb, although they can be found on comb faces.Ĭolonies rear on average 10 to 25 cells at once. The first visual sign that a colony is preparing to swarm is the appearance of queen cells in which the queen is reared.Īs queens develop the cells elongate and resemble a peanut in which the queen emerges from the tip. Swarming occurs during periods of intense flowering and as a bystander you will notice foragers with copious amounts of pollen entering the colony. There are many factors that induce queen rearing, including colony congestion, which leads to reduced transmission of queen pheromones throughout the colony, presence of queen cells, increased drone brood, and resource abundance or intense flowering. Swarming preparations begin with queen rearing, up to four weeks before the swarm issues. You can see there is a secondary peak in swarming during late summer in July and August as fall nectar flow begins. Swarming peaks in mid-spring during May and June. Swarming occurs when adult bee populations peak. With this increase and the accompanying increase in adult bees, the nest area of the colony becomes crowded and the colony will begin swarming preparations. Here is a graph showing the daily number of adult bees and brood in a colony over the course of one season.ĭuring early spring, the lengthening days and ample resources of pollen and nectar stimulate brood rearing. The population of a colony fluctuates throughout the year according to the seasons and the resource availability. It is used as a management strategy to reduce swarming incidences and increase colony numbers. Swarming is when the majority of worker bees in the colony along with the queen leave the original nest to establish a new nest.įor example, in a neighboring tree or the siding of a house.Ī split is an artificial swarm implemented by a beekeeper. Honey bee swarms are a normal sign of a productive and strong colony. Swarming is a unique form of reproduction at the colony level.

Bee hive split how to#

I will first give you a brief overview of the biology of a swarm, and then I will dive into how to perform a split. Welcome, I'm going to walk you through a quick and simple method to divide or split a colony.