Newsletter Date
Feeding and Making Splits
written by David MacFawn and Mark Sweatman
Feeding and making splits are intertwined and related. There is seasonality to
feeding and splitting. Feeding is related to keeping the bees alive and
nourished. Splitting is a way to keeping your bees rather than allowing them to
swarming. Feeding will stimulate colony growth and allow for splitting.
It is natural for bees to swarm. It is how the colony can reproduce and survive.
However, to produce a crop of honey, lots of bees are needed. If the colony
swarms, approximately half the bees in the colony go with the swarm, thereby
reducing your nectar gathering workforce, although there will normally be lots
of brood left behind to make up numbers later. The full work force necessary to
produce a surplus of honey will not be achieved. Hence, minimizing swarming is
a goal of the beekeeper in order to make a surplus honey crop. In contrast,
swarming is a goal of the bees to reproduce the colony.
Feeding strategy starts in the autumn. The beekeeper needs to make sure that
the colony has enough “honey” to get it thru the winter until about the first
part of April in South Carolina when the nectar flow starts. The beekeeper
needs to watch that the colony does not get “honey bound” when feeding. This
is a condition where the bees have backfilled the comb that the queen would
normally use for laying eggs with honey or syrup.
Normally, it takes a nectar flow for the bees to draw out comb; feeding syrup
when there is no nectar flow may not activate the bees to draw comb. Hence, a
colony can get nectar bound quickly; over feeding can definitely promote
swarming late in the season. Likewise, if you feed excessively in late winter
when the queen is laying a lot to build the colony strength for the coming nectar
flow, you can promote swarming very early in the spring. It is always a good
idea when feeding to do a visual inspection inside the hive to confirm the bees
need feeding and there is ample drawn comb to store the syrup. If there is
undrawn foundation and no open comb, you cannot assume the bees will use the
syrup to draw comb in which to store the syrup.
Beekeepers Calendar
1.
Make Splits
2.
Feed
3.
It is critical that the colony has enough stores in the autumn. If needed,
feeding early in the fall will allow the bees to store the reserves before
temperatures becomes too cold. The food reserves will allow the colony to
build up naturally in the late winter thru the first of April and help minimize
swarming. However, some years you may still have to feed in late winter,
especially in the March time frame.
The colony starts increasing its size after the winter solstice in December.
Initially it takes very little honey and pollen to support the brood rearing
since very little brood is raised. However, by March the colony is in full
brood rearing and requires a lot of honey and pollen. Frames two and nine
should be full of pollen by November / December. These two frames of
pollen are required to support brood from December until the Maples bloom
around the end of January / first of February in most parts of South Carolina.
A strong colony can go thru a deep frame of honey in a week in March.
Hence, the beekeeper needs to keep a close watch that the colony does not
starve.
Swarm cells are usually at the bottom of the frames in a Langstroth ten
frame hive. They are numerous. Supercedure cells are usually in the top
1/3 of the frames and are less numerous than swarm cells. Look down
between the brood frames and notice whether the bees are visibly crowded.
When you pull out the brood frames, are the frames totally covered and
crowded? The goal is to maintain 5 bee/in2 (Discussions with Dr. John Harbo,
retired, Baton Rouge Bee Lab, Louisiana, United States.)
Usually, if feeding is required in the late winter, it is in the February and
March time frame. The beekeeper needs to keep a close watch that the
colony does not get honey bound. Usually in the February and March time
frame they will not because of the heavy brood rearing going on. This varies
between colonies and the brood rearing rate.
If you want to definitely split the end of February when the drones
start to fly, then you should consider starting to feed the middle of
January. This gets back to your management strategy and if you
want to just maintain your colony numbers or pursue an increase in
colony numbers. You should note though that usually there will be
some healthy colonies that you will have to split to keep them
from swarming. The beekeeper can use these healthy colony
splits to make up for any colony losses.
The beekeepers should only feed up to the start of the nectar flow. When the extra
honey supers go on, feeding should stop since you do not want syrup to be stored in the
honey supers. Hence, the extra honey supers should go on at the start of the nectar
flow.
The start of the nectar flow can be monitored in three ways. First, when the edges of
the drawn comb have fresh white wax, often this is the start of the nectar flow.
Second, the beekeeper can look in the colony for fresh nectar. And third, observe the
bees at the entrance. If they are flying with a “sense of purpose” there is a nectar
flow on.
After the nectar flow in June, when the colony cuts back on brood rearing, feeding
easily results in a honey bound brood nest and unnecessary swarming. The bee numbers
will be high and the Varroa mite count will continue to climb. This is a perfect time to
split but you should treat for Varroa prior to splitting so you only have to treat one
colony instead of two splits. Requeening hives with a young queen helps ensure that the
colony will not swarm. Queen cups are another indicator or swarming, but a weak one
as they are usually present in any vigorous colony and really are an insurance policy,
giving the bees the option of using them if they want to.
There are several ways to reduce swarming; Demaree (keeping the queen in the brood
chamber on a frame of brood and moving most of the brood frames up above the queen
excluder) seems to be the only sure way. Some beekeepers cut out all the queen cells
they see but invariably they miss one and the colony swarms anyway. Cutting queen
cells is labor intensive and tough to do if you have very many colonies. Another
method is to pull a frame or two of brood out of the colony and make up a nucleus or
another colony from several colony frames and the old queen. Re-queen the old colony
with a young laying queen.
Colonies also seem to swarm in the spring / summer after a cool spell or a rainy spell.
There’s a reason for this. Bees usually die away from the hive, either from wear and
tear, predators (birds for instance) or simply old age. If they aren’t flying they aren’t
dying, yet new bees are being born at that time of year at over 1,000 a day. Thus a few
days non-flying weather (or no flowers worth the effort of visiting) means that the
colony can very rapidly become overcrowded resulting in breakdown in distribution of
queen substance, triggering swarm preparations.
As a beekeeper you want to monitor the colony and make splits or other arrangements
prior to (instead of) the colony swarming. Remember, you want to keep the bees but
make them believe that they have swarmed. Reducing brood nest congesting by pulling
a frame or two seems to work well but
not always. Demaree seems to be the
only fool proof way to prevent
swarming.
The Demaree method is labor intensive which may not make it usable by commercial beekeepers. Basically the method instructs to destroy all the queen cells in the brood chamber, transfer all the brood frames above a queen excluder and/or a super of honey placing
the brood frames in a brood chamber at the top of the hive. Place frames of drawn comb in
the bottom brood chamber with the queen. Often one frame of brood will be left in the
bottom brood chamber. After about eight days destroy any queen cells you find in the top
brood chamber. The bees will emerge in the upper brood chamber and no bees will be lost.
In the Padgen method, the hive that is intending to swarm has a frame of brood, together
with the queen removed and placed into another brood chamber filled with drawn comb or
foundation. This new hive is put on the old site and the ‘parent’ hive containing the rest of
the brood and bees moved to one side. The supers can go back on the old site too as the
foragers will rejoin the queen and, as there is little brood to feed, can store what they
bring in. There will be a shortage of young bees with the queen and so they will give up
their inclination to swarm. The old parent part of the hive can be requeened and the field
force comes into the new hive believing they have swarmed.
The colonies can remain separate if you want to increase colony numbers, or the two parts
can be reunited later on in the season headed
by the new queen. You can repeat that trick
some weeks later, preferably when you think
a honey flow is about to start. If you used
foundation or starter strips rather than drawn
comb there will be lots of foraging bees with
little brood to feed and nowhere to put all
that nectar except in the supers until comb is
drawn in the brood box.
If you pull too much honey and do not leave enough honey on the hive for the summer dearth and
winter, then you will have to feed during the summer. You need to be very careful that the colony
does not get honey bound from too much feeding. This will cause unnecessary summer swarming,
unless of course you intentally want to split the colony during the summer.
A colony that looks
like this the first of
March in South
Carolina can be
split.
This is a frame from the center of the brood nest; normally
in the April or May timeframe in South Carolina. When the
brood nest is at its maximum size, in a Langstroth ten
frame hive, frames one and ten is normally honey, frames
two and nine are mostly pollen, and frames three thru eight
is the brood nest. A frame from the brood nest center, like
the above picture, should have brood in the middle, with a
band of pollen above the brood, and honey in the corners.
Often there will be some open cells between the brood and
the band of pollen. If the pollen or honey in the corners is
absent, you need to feed pollen / substitute or syrup (1:1 in
the spring and 2:1 in the autumn by weight). In the April
or May time frame, the brood nest may be across a deep
brood chamber and also the super immediately above the
deep brood chamber. In this case look for the band of
pollen and honey in the top super.
In the Spring during the nectar flow, the worker brood should follow the 1:2:4 rule. That is
eggs comprise one part or 14% of the brood nest, larvae is two parts or 24% of the brood
nest, and capped brood four parts or about 62% of the brood nest.
When the colony is “healthy”, there will be from 14% to 17% drones. When the drones start
flying the end of February or first of March, you should be on the look-out for swarms and
examining your colonies with splitting in mind so that you keep your bees, and the colony
does not swarm.
So you can split colonies the end of February, first of March; during the nectar flow in the
April, May timeframe; and in the summer up to about August. It is usually tough to get a
queen in the end of February, first of March time frame so a walk-away split may be
appropriate. However, if you are concerned about making honey when you split during the
nectar flow in April and May, then you should install a mated queen in the split half that
does not have a queen. Splitting after August is not
recommended in South Carolina since the colony needs
time to build up its bee numbers prior to winter and it is
more difficult to purchase queens. The colony needs not
only honey and pollen, but also bee numbers to get them
thru the winter.
Splits in late June - early July, after honey is extracted,
is an excellent way to produce nuc colonies to over
winter. Later in the fall these nucs can be used to
strengthen weak colonies or provide queens. Nuc colonies
successfully overwintered will develop into productive
colonies for the coming year.
Thanks to Cliff Ward for demonstrating in the two pictures in this
article.