Increasing Your Hive Count
Richard Wahl
Once you have caught the bug (pun intended) of bee management there is the urge to increase your hive count in the coming year, particularly if your first hive survived the Winter. I know of several beginners that started with one hive and if they failed to get them through the first year, go out and buy another package of bees to try again. I have also known a few who just gave up on the idea of keeping bees. For those just starting out I would recommend two hives, or even better, two nucs so that a comparison of the two can be observed. It is much easier to notice an anomaly in one of two hives if they are performing differently than to figure that something is not quite right with only one hive to observe.
Packages
The sale of three pound packages of bees keep many commercial bee businesses in operation. There is nothing wrong with that, but I find most beekeepers like to be frugal with their spending and would avoid buying new replacement packages each year if they could.
One way to accomplish this is to buy a spare queen and split that initial three pound package into two halves. If this is done it is best to initially put each half in a smaller five frame nuc rather than a large ten frame deep.
That lesser number of bees still need to keep the queen and any newly laid eggs warm so reducing their initial space will help them get off to a good start. I know of several beekeepers in my area of SE Michigan who have done this successfully on more than one occasion. I would also suggest that if using this method a later nuc/hive insertion is better than getting bees as early as possible. Temperatures will be warmer for the later package deliveries and this will be less stressful if a package is split. Another consideration is to be sure the extra queen can remain in her cage for a few days so the half package she is joined with will have time to acclimate to her new pheromones. The package bees during transportation will have adjusted to the original queen that came with the purchased package and so the other half will need time to adjust to a different queen. Acclimation to a new queen should not take more than a day. It will normally take the bees more than two days to chew through the candy plug and release the queen. I have successfully started new nucs with just three deep frames, a ten frame deep split into three sections with separated sections and entrances for each three frame nuc even if only using two of those sections.
A ten frame deep could easily be split into two sections as long as the sections are completely separate and have separate entrances.
It should be understood that a three pound package is obtained when the commercial beekeeper shakes bees from several different hives into the package to ensure a good selection of bees. The queen most likely comes from an even different laying queen nuc source and all have to acclimate to each other during their journey to a new location. There is an even better way, although a bit more expensive, which is to purchase a locally produced nucleus hive.
Nucleus Hives
A nucleus hive (nuc for short) will normally consist of five frames with a mated laying queen that is the mother of most of the bees in the nuc. Two or three of the frames will already have eggs, larva and brood on them possibly with some stored pollen and/or nectar on the outer frame edges as well. One or two frames will have stored pollen and nectar or honey that is the nuc food source. The fifth frame may be partially empty or have some portion of pollen/nectar/honey stores. The advantages of a nuc are that it is a small established hive.
Since there is a laying queen with some capped brood and larva it gives a head start over a package as new bees will hatch out in a matter of days (worker bees stay as capped pupa for about 12 days). In the event a package came with an unmated queen that adds another eight to 10 days for that queen to mate and a day or two more before she even starts to lay eggs. If a beekeeper can be found in your area who sells nucs, those bees will most likely have come from stock that has overwintered and therefore be more acclimated to your area climate. This increases the following Winter chance for overwintering success. If the weather cooperates there may even be the chance of the hive growing to the point where an added honey super or two might be taken in late Summer or Fall. This is less likely to occur with an installed package as those bees and queen, as stated above, need longer to build up to the point where a honey super is added.
Swarms
Swarms can occur anytime from late Spring through the Fall. A normal cause of swarming is the bees becoming overcrowded in their allotted hive space. This can occur when an ongoing strong brood buildup is coupled with a good nectar flow.
Swarming may also occur due to poor hive ventilation, excessive mite build up or just the natural instinct to reproduce. The space issue can be monitored by the beekeeper such that when brood, pollen, nectar and honey cover 75% to 80% of the available frames a new super with empty or drawn comb frames is added. The beekeeper can also monitor ventilation by raising one end of the outer cover or even offsetting an upper super a quarter inch or so between supers to allow a small space for air flow. Mite loads should also be checked about once a month and appropriate treatments applied if needed, as an excessive mite population can be a cause for swarming. Even with all these precautions a hive may decide to swarm as the urge to procreate and reproduce is a universal trait among all living things.
With this in mind the conscientious beekeeper is wise to have a spare hive and/or nuc available. Once there is a hive or two established in the apiary the likelihood of a swarm incident increases tremendously. I never saw a swarm for twenty years living in the same location. But after my first swarm catch thirteen years ago, from my third year of beekeeping to present, I have had two to six swarms appear each Summer, most of which have been captured. This may be partially due to at least four other beekeepers within five miles of my small apiary. I have successfully brought a second week of August swarm catch through the following Winter. The key is to feed a two to one sugar syrup mix until the weather consistently gets below freezing and then switch to a candy board or sugar feeder through the remainder of the Winter until going back to syrup feeding the following Spring.
Splits
Another way to increase your hive count is to split a strong hive that has a good queen and ample brood population. This will be most advantageous if it can be done with a hive that has come through the Winter with last year’s queen laying a solid brood pattern on three, four or more frames.
If the hive has two deeps and there are eggs and three to six day larva next to the eggs in both top and bottom deeps, there is a very easy way to make a split. Simply insert a queen excluder between the two deeps and make sure the inner cover entrance hole is down, or next to the top deep frames. Although the bees will continue to work both deeps, there is an 80% chance the one without a queen will make a new queen and continue working in combination with the older queen above or below. Separating the two deeps each given their own individual bottom boards, inner and outer covers increases the likelihood that a new queen will be raised in the queenless deep to near 100%. Last year I had a hive where there were five to six frames with brood by early Summer. I did a three way split evenly dividing the brood frames between three hives. Each of two brood frames pushed together in the center of new hives were also bounded on either side by pollen/nectar frames with remaining space filled in with newly waxed frames on the outer sides. I did not worry about which hive the queen remained in as that became apparent a few days later with eggs showing up in one of the hives. The other two naturally needed the bees to raise new queens. These hives had a good brood break (a mite control method) and resulted in the newly raised queens mating and starting to lay eggs about a month after the split. This is what is known as a walk away split. Of course new queens could have been purchased for the two without queens, but that would have required me to initially locate the hive with the original queen, which I never saw and was only evidenced when new eggs were almost immediately spotted in one of the three hive splits.
Purchasing new queens would have begun the start of egg laying about a month earlier and would have increased the possibility of collecting more honey from those hives later in the season. I was curious whether I could speed the possibility of collecting a bit more honey than usual from the newly split hives and so tried a different approach. I moved the two newly queened hives right next to each other touching on a common side after adding a second deep. I placed a queen excluder over the right and left halves of the adjacent hives and used five frame nuc covers to cover the remaining halves. I also used some four frame inner covers that I had made for some four frame nucs on the outer halves of the brood deeps with five frame nuc covers over those. (Two, four frame, side by side nucs fit nicely under a ten frame hive outer cover.) On the inner halves over the queen excluder I placed a honey super that was now being worked by bees in both hives. The bees seemed to get along just fine even with bottom openings both on the same side, possibly due to the two queens being sisters and probably having similar pheromones. I soon needed to add a second honey super, sooner than they would have been added if each hive were sitting separately. While this was going on I also used some eggs from the same parent hive to graft several queens which were placed in nucs next to these adjacent hives. It was not long before I noticed the queen in the nuc, closest to the touching neighbor hives, did not have eggs or signs of a laying queen. I simply assumed that queen did not return from a mating flight. A week or two later I was curious as to how the second honey super on the adjacent hives was doing. I peeked in and pulled a few honey frames to find a third queen with several frames of eggs and brood now in the second honey super.
A quick check revealed that neither queen below had found its way into the honey supers. My assumption is that the sister queen that should have gone back to her nuc, instead returned to the upper entrance of the honey supers jointly above the hives below. I soon moved her and the brood frames along with the remainder of her nuc into their own hive where she continued to do as well as the newly split queens in the adjacent hives below.
Conclusion
These are some of the ways I have increased my hive count. Four or five years ago I decided that I knew enough about bees that I could increase my hive numbers without buying new packages as they seem to continually get more expensive. These techniques have worked well for me, but your beekeeping experience could vary based on your environmental conditions, experience or state of your hives. Give one of these techniques a try as there is more than one way to increase your hive count besides the option of always purchasing new packages.
Correction
Learning to write for a magazine is much like learning
beekeeping, sometimes mistakes are made. In the April issue the subtitle should have been “The Bane of Mites” instead of the subtitle carried over from the March issue. Also the reference
to new bees “hatching” from capped brood should have used the term “emerging” as only eggs hatch. Also the picture labeled as “oxalic dribble in progress” should have been credited as “photo by Randy Oliver.”
