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So You Want More Bees
By: Richard Wahl
Photo credit: Richard Wahl
Turning One Hive into Many
Once you’ve caught the beekeeping bug (pun intended), and most of us do after that first successful overwinter, you start looking out across the yard and thinking, one hive just does not seem like enough. That curiosity naturally turns into ambition. The good news is, growing your hive count does not always mean opening your wallet every Spring to pay for more bees. In fact, some of the most rewarding increases come from working with what you already have in your bee yard. I have known plenty of beginners who start with a single hive. If it does not make it through the first season, they either buy another package and try again, or give up altogether. But here is something I will always recommend early on. Start with at least two colonies, or better yet, two nucs. Having a pair gives you a point of reference. When one hive is thriving and the other is not, the difference tells a story you simply cannot see with a single hive.
I was once asked to go to a beginner’s bee yard as the owner suspected there was a problem in one of her two hives. While one hive was booming with plenty of bees coming and going and bringing in pollen, the other just did not seem to have the same amount of activity. This was observed before ever popping open the hive cover. Upon inspection the new beekeeper’s suspicions were proven to be correct. While one hive had plenty of eggs, larva and capped brood, the other had no eggs or larva and only a small amount of capped brood remaining. The hive had evidently lost its queen at some earlier occasion and the bees had not initiated the making of a new queen. The most likely scenario is that the queen was damaged in a prior inspection. If the owner had not had two hives for comparison, a single queenless hive may have gone on for much longer before a problem was noted with no chance for recovery. This problem was solved by moving a frame with eggs and young larva to the queenless hive which allowed those bees to raise a new queen. It was reported later that both hives were doing well going into the Fall.
On another occasion, when asked to assist in the inspection of a beginner’s two hives, it was apparent that both were doing quite well with one capable of being split.The owner had a nucleus (nuc) box with empty frames ready and a split was accomplished on the spot resulting in three hives for the owner through the remainder of the Summer. This brings us to the reason for this article: how to increase your hive count using various options or more importantly, your own assets.
Making More from Less with Packages
I have to admit that as a novice in my first years of beekeeping I would occasionally buy a package or two of bees to augment what I had already gotten through the Winter, or to replace hives I had lost. What kept me going is that at least one hive survived each Winter despite my early naive erratic care. Three-pound packages are the backbone of many commercial operations, and there’s nothing wrong with using them. But if you are like most beekeepers I know, you would rather stretch your investment dollars than repeat a purchase every year. One practical approach that I was not aware of in my early beekeeping is to split a package into two smaller starts by introducing a second queen. Instead of installing all those bees into a full-size ten-frame deep, dividing them into smaller nuc setups between two five-frame boxes works well. This will require the purchase of a second queen, but make the single three pound package stretch farther. It was much later when I discovered that success could be achieved with three-frame configurations. Fewer bees need less space to regulate temperature, which is critical when they’re trying to keep brood warm and establish a new queen’s rhythm.
I have since used some three frame mating nucs when doing some of my splits. Timing matters here. A slightly later installation, when temperatures are more forgiving, reduces stress on those smaller clusters. And when introducing that second queen, give your bees time to adjust. They have already bonded to the original queen during transport, so a short acclimation period, while the new queen remains in her cage, goes a long way toward acceptance. You can tell if the queen will be accepted by watching the bees react while she is still caged. If bees seem to be sticking their tails into the screen they are trying to sting her and she has not been accepted. If they are sticking their proboscis (mouth feeding tube) into the screen, they are attempting to feed her and she has most likely been accepted. Lightly misting a bit of sugar water on the queen cage will encourage the bees to more readily accept the new queen. A bit more frequent monitoring is necessary with the smaller nucs since a good egg laying queen can result in a fast increase in the nuc population. If the bees feel over crowded it can introduce the instinct to swarm, even from a small nuc.
A Running Start with Nucleus Colonies
If there’s a “fast track” in beekeeping, it is the nucleus colony. A nuc is essentially a small, functioning hive, complete with a laying queen, brood in various stages that are the offspring of that queen, and food stores already in place. A nuc has bees in all three stages, eggs, larva and capped brood. Because brood is already capped and developing, new workers begin emerging within days, not weeks. Compare that to a package, where you might be waiting on a queen to mate and begin laying before population growth even starts. Queen mating can take as much as two weeks depending on weather. She will usually begin laying eggs two to three days after her last mating flight which typically occurs twenty-one to thirty-five days after she emerged from the capped cell. Even if the package comes with a mated queen, by the time she is laying eggs and those eggs go through the larva and pupa stage twenty-one days have passed. Before new bees can begin their foraging duties another week or two has elapsed. That is how much of a head start a nuc provides. It can make a noticeable difference, especially in northern climates. Even better, locally sourced nucs normally come from overwintered stock. Those bees already have a track record in your environment, which can improve your odds when the next Winter rolls around. And in a good season, a strong nuc might even build up enough to produce a surplus honey crop; something that is far less likely with a first-year package. I have managed to take a few frames of capped honey from early start nucs that were the result of splits or swarm catches and still leave enough for the bees to successfully overwinter.
Swarms are an Opportunity
Swarms are often misconstrued as a problem for the small scale beekeeper. After all, anyone who loses half a hive as a result of a swarming event cannot be too pleased. However, the swarming instinct should be looked at as a sign of a healthy colony, particularly if it is the result of a strong overwintered hive. The urge of bees to swarm will occur for any of three reasons. The colony has outgrown its space and needed more room, it has a desire to procreate to continue the genetic line or mite loads and diseases are overstressing the hive. Since a colony is often considered to be a “super organism”, I have heard of the procreation urge compared to mammals giving birth. A swarm is the colony’s way of giving birth to continue the genetics of the colony. The difference being the originating colony produces a new queen while the exiting swarm takes the mature older queen with them.
There are ways to mitigate the swarming instinct or use it to your advantage. Swarms are nature’s way of making more bees and if you are prepared, they can be your way of doing the same. Most swarms happen when a colony outgrows its space, especially during a strong nectar flow. Keeping ahead of that growth by adding supers when frames are about 75% to 80% occupied can help manage congestion. Good ventilation, along with regular mite and disease monitoring also reduces stress factors that contribute to swarming. Still, bees will sometimes swarm simply because that is what bees do. That’s why it pays to keep a spare hive or nuc box ready. Once you have established colonies, your odds of encountering swarms, your own or someone else’s, increase dramatically.
I went into my fifth year of beekeeping with only two overwintered hives. This was mainly due to less than stellar mite management on my part and a small four legged critter that took an interest in and devoured bees in three of my hives over the Winter. The surviving two colonies were strong and that Summer I captured seven swarms. As I ran out of equipment after the third and fourth, I gave the fifth and sixth swarm to other beekeepers with the seventh deciding not to stay in a recently acquired new hive. Now it is not unusual for me to catch several swarms in a single season. Late-season swarms can even be overwintered successfully with proper feeding. A steady diet of 2:1 sugar syrup heading into Fall, followed by consistent feeding during Winter, can carry a smaller colony through until Spring buildup begins again. I once accomplished this with a captured swarm in the third week of August. With heavy Fall and Winter feeding they survived that first Winter with careful monitoring.
Splits or Building from Strength
If you have a strong healthy hive coming out of Winter, you are already holding the key to expansion. Splitting a colony lets you turn one productive hive into two or more. Whether you choose a simple two-way or a more hands-off walk-away split is up to you. When brood is abundant across multiple frames, and eggs are present, you can divide those resources across one or more splits and let the bees raise new queens where needed. In most cases, the queenless half will begin raising a replacement queen on its own, provided eggs and small larva are present. There are plenty of ways to do it. A simple approach is separating brood boxes with a queen excluder, and then dividing them later into individual hives. I once experimented by setting two newly split hives side by side, each with its own queen. I then placed shared honey supers above a queen excluder, over the half of each of the adjacent touching hives. It worked, maybe a little too well, when a swarm moved in through an inner cover vent notch over the honey supers and gave me a third queen to deal with. With three queens now in the hives and honey supers I moved the queenright honey supers into their own hive and replaced the honey supers with empties. That turned into one of the easiest swarm catches I have ever made. It reinforced a simple point; splits set up with their own equipment tend to be more predictable and successful.
Walk-away splits are especially satisfying because the bees sort it out by themselves. One half keeps the original queen while the other raises a new one. The trade-off is time. Between queen development, mating, and the first new workers emerging, you are looking at roughly six weeks before that split is back up to speed. If you want to skip that delay, introducing a purchased queen after a short queenless period of a few hours up to a full day, can get the new colony moving much faster. Be sure to place the new queen in the queenless split. One advantage of the walk-away split in addition to allowing them to raise their own queen is a brood break. Mite reproduction is interrupted with no capped brood for a period, and that can noticeably reduce mite pressure. The decrease will be even more dramatic if a treatment is used during the brood break. Splits can also turn into immediate increases in hive counts or even income. A four or five frame nuc with an overwintered queen can be sold right away, while the parent colony raises a replacement queen. If the nuc is the one raising the queen, then you are back to allowing time for her to emerge, mate, and start laying before it is ready to be sold or become a new hive.
One of the details that can quietly make or break the success of a walk-away split is drone availability. It is easy to get excited when the first warm stretch hits and the bees are building up; but the calendar the drones are on does not always match the one you and the queen are on. When performing a walk-away split, the lead time for drones to be sexually mature and available to mate with a new queen is generally three to five weeks from the time you first see capped drone brood. While drones emerge in about fourteen to fifteen days after being capped, they require an additional ten to twenty days to become sexually mature and able to mate. That makes the total development-to-maturity time significantly longer than that of a queen. Because of that mismatch, the safest play is to hold off on splits until you see drones emerging, ensuring they will be ready to mate by the time the new queen is ready. If you jump the gun and split too early, you run the risk of a poorly mated queen or, worse, one that never gets properly mated at all. Your signal that the local breeding season is underway is when you start seeing robust drones walking around your frames and taking flight. Those drones will head out to drone congregation areas (DCAs), mixing with drones from neighboring apiaries. Even though your own drones are a good indicator, it is really a neighborhood-wide event. Most colonies in your area are responding to the same environmental cues, so drone production tends to be in sync across local apiaries. Queens will fly a greater distance to reach DCAs than the drones ensuring a broad genetic mix, while drones typically stay closer to home. That combination gives you confidence that when your queen takes her mating flights, she will find plenty of well-developed drones from other apiaries and will come back properly mated.
A Practical Perspective
There comes a point in beekeeping when you realize you do not have to keep buying bees to keep up with beekeeping losses or to increase your hive count. With a bit of planning, careful note taking and a willingness to experiment, you can let your apiary grow from within. Packages, nucs, swarms and splits all offer different paths to the same goal: self-sustainability with more hives, stronger colonies, and a deeper understanding of how bees operate. What works best will depend on your timing, your environment, and the condition of your colonies. But one thing holds true across the board. There is more than one way to grow an apiary. Figuring out which way works best for you is part of what makes beekeeping so rewarding, year after year, hive by hive.
