Absorbing Winter Losses, and Prepping for Expansion!

The winter of 2018-2019 was long and arduous, and we saw some fairly heavy losses (around 60%) of our colonies. I suspect this result can be attributed to all the starts-and-stops to spring we experienced in the Pioneer Valley.

Now that Spring has finally truly arrived, now is the time to make power moves as beekeepers. The most sustainable and cost-effective method of absorbing winter losses is by “splitting” the remaining hives, doubling the survivor stock and increasing our hardiest genetic stock. Splitting a hive involves the transplantation of queens or queen cells from the parent hive into a new box. I personally prefer moving the queen herself to a new hive — namely because this method has enjoyed a fine rate of success in both my apiaries. It is typically more difficult than moving frames with inanimate queen cells as the queen herself can be difficult to find at times and typically I do not mark my queens (although I probably should). The key reasons why moving frames with queen cells is the less-viable option comes down to the number of variables that can stand in the way of its success: The queen cells may not hatch, and if they do, they may not return from their mating flights; should either be the case, there is a lack of copious fresh brood to produce back-up queen cells. So, in short, moving the queens themselves is the way I like to do things.

Despite the heavy losses this winter yielded, the hives that did survive came into spring very strong with exploding populations, and were even producing drones as early as April 1st! Hives produce large amounts of drones (male bees) when they are preparing to swarm, this is so that they will have plenty of drones on hand to fertilize any new queens who hatch following the natural swarm process. However, it is typically considered a responsible beekeeping practice to prevent natural swarming behavior by splitting your hives — this way you don’t lose any of your bees, neighbors don’t end up with swarms of bees in their gardens, and there are fewer colonies that end up holed up in the walls of people’s houses. So splitting is the name of the game when it comes to strong overwintered colonies during the months of April and May, and we have thus embarked on an active endeavor to split all of our surviving colonies to maximize the proliferation of our survivor stock. Typically people begin splitting in May, but our hives appear to be ahead of schedule and therefore we anticipate splitting some of them possibly a second time around June or early July if they recover quickly enough.

The transplanted queens are now in their new boxes with 2-3 frames of capped brood, eggs, 2-3 frames of empty drawn comb to expand into, and 4-5 frames of honey and pollen to eat during their quarantine period of 2-3 days. During this time, if the new hive is not moved 1-2 miles away from the original parent hive, it is crucial to keep these bees sealed off and shut into their new hive. This is to ensure that the bees from the original hive won’t just follow their queen to the new location, and that the transplanted bees won’t become confused as to which box to call home. After 48-72 hours, all of the bees’ internal GPS will reset, and unsealing the new box will result in the bees coming outside and preforming orientation flights, orienting themselves to the new box. Once the parent hive produces a laying queen, the split will be a complete success!

In addition to our own splitting tactics of expansion, we also have some Carniolan package bees on the way to help bolster both of our bee yard’s populations for the coming summer. We look forward to producing even more bees and honey in 2019 than we ever have before! Thank you so much for reading and stay tuned for more updates!