splitting the hive.avi

My neighbor Alan and I had been trying to produce a new bee colony by spotting, and exporting, a queen cell (a large baby-cell that contains a future queen). But we couldn't find one. On Father's Day, our old queen decided to get her colony to swarm. This was bad news (we might lose 1/2 the existing colony) and good news (it meant she had prepared a new queen to take over the old hive). For some reason, she decided to swarm her colony back into the hive, and this video shows how we moved fast to find the new queen cell and put it, along with 5 other honey/brood frames, into Alan's uninhabited hive. It was 150 degrees and 95% humidity when we did it—

A month and 1/2 later, and I'm pleased to say we have 2 colonies, healthy, humming and honey-ful!

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• bees
• permaculture
• grown in westhampton
• locavore
• self-reliance
• kurt heidinger

[dave4854]

take them gloves off and you won't need that frame holder and you'll have more controll.

[SuzanneASutton]

It would be helpful to see you actually make the split - what kind of box you put it in, what kinds of frames you move, did you move queen cells or just brood cells, and how you made sure you didn't move the queen along with the 5 frames. Pictures were great, explanation was good, I was just hoping to see a split, based on the title, not just hear about it.