If your bees came through the winter, do a happy dance! Now, consider what you will do to manage swarms.
When a colony makes it to spring and its population starts to ramp up ahead of the nectar flow, the bees’ instincts often lead them to throw off a swarm. To understand this behavior, it is helpful to consider the colony as a superorganism. The bees are not interested in reproducing themselves as individuals—the queen is the only one who really can do so—they are interested in reproducing healthy colonies. A swarm is a robust colony splitting itself into two (or more!) colonies.
Honey Bee Democracy goes into fascinating detail on the swarming process and how bees make group decisions. When bees decide to swarm, they make queen cups, prepare the existing hive to raise a new queen, rally the old queen and about half of the bees, and depart to find a new home. Usually, they land in a big blob near the original hive—on a tree branch, a gutter, etc.—and send scouts out to find a new place to live. Once they agree, through a dance-based vote, they move to that location.
Why to Split a Hive
Unless you live way out in the middle of nowhere, the conventional wisdom is that you should at least try to control this swarming impulse, either by splitting your hives before they swarm or catching your bees when they do. Otherwise, the swarm could move into someone’s attic, for example. A beekeeper cannot always control the swarming instinct, so if you see a swarm a) don’t be scared; swarms are not defensive or aggressive and b) call a local beekeeper or beekeeping club to get those bees. The survival rate for wild swarms is pretty bad, especially if they are not caught by a beekeeper.
One way to keep bees from swarming is to keep providing the bees with more hive boxes so they have space in which to build comb. Another is to split the hive, which is sometimes called an artificial swarm. It is not foolproof, but the idea is that if you divide the colony into two hives, you have met the purpose of the swarm and hopefully the bees won’t decide to leave.
My single beehive came roaring out of winter, so I decided to split them last week. I felt it was a bit early in the season, but by doing the split early, they would have time to build up into two big workforces for the nectar flow. When inspecting the hive, I found a few empty queen cells on the bottom of the frames (the typical location for swarm cells). There were also a ton of bees.
How to Split a Hive
To make the split, I set up a beehive my in-laws gave me for my birthday last year (thank you!). I continued to inspect the original hive—The Bee & Bee—until I located the queen bee. I moved her into the new hive along with several frames of brood (baby bees) in various stages and several frames with honey and pollen mixed in. In The Bee & Bee, I carefully made sure that they had several frames that had brand new eggs on them. An egg looks like a grain of rice. When the queen lays them, they generally stand straight up at the bottom of the cell, and over the next couple of days, they start to tilt over (see below). The bees left behind in the original hive need these brand new eggs so they can turn them into a new queen.
A different option than what I did is called a “walk away split.” To split the hive this way, I would have simply divided my double-deep hive in two, placing the top brood box on a new bottom board and adding a fresh box to the top of each hive. This method trusts that the queen and resources are distributed evenly among the hive boxes and that one half of the split will have the queen and the other will have the eggs needed to replace her. In a couple of weeks, when you inspect the hives, you will hopefully discover which half was which. This is not my preferred method, but many keepers use it successfully.
When to Split a Hive
I took a class at the local beekeeping store about maximizing your honey harvest. They advised against splitting a colony, because a big population of bees in the hive at the nectar flow helps the bees produce more honey in that limited window. My gut, however, told me that this hive needed to be split. I was a bit concerned about the weather this past week, but based on the forecast there was just going to be one cold day and the bees should have enough resources to stay warm and fed during that time.
It snowed 10 inches. So, I was very anxious about the temperature and how much food the smaller split had, until I made it out to the hives and could hear bees still buzzing in both. Today, I am putting a feeder with 1:1 syrup in the smaller half of the split once the temperature hits 50. I should have done that in the first place!
Generally, swarm season starts in April in much of the United States, so from then through the summer here are some things to consider:
How much empty space do the bees have? If the population covers most of the frames, it is time to split or add a new box.
How much brood is the queen producing?
Are the overnight temperatures warm enough for a small cluster of bees to stay warm?
Have the bees started to make swarm cells or queen cups?
What does your gut say?
Are you trying to grow your apiary?
Fellow beekeepers, what are your tips and tricks for performing splits and/or managing swarms?
Readers, what should I name the new hive, which now houses Queen Wednesday? Let me know in the comments.