April 21, 2026 there were 22 people in attendance. David made the motion to accept the March 17, 2026 minutes as emailed out on April 12, 2026. Ken seconded the motion. All were in favor.
Our guest speaker was David Ellis. David spoke about when to split your bees. It is best to know what your purpose is when going into your bees. You don’t want to go into them too much. You can learn a lot from watching the bees from the outside of the hive. It is very disruptive when you go into a hive, especially on a cooler day. It is important to learn if you have eggs or not, then you don’t have to spend extra time in the hive searching for the queen.
If you aren’t sure what to do for your bees, then do nothing. When making a split, make sure you don’t take away too much from the original hive. If you have a 10 frame hive with 8 good frames, don’t take more than 4 frames. If you are making a split from a 5 frame nuc, just take a couple of frames. Some purposes of splitting are: to grow your apiary, replace a winter loss, swarm prevention, and/or resource building-raise queens.
A small swarm could be the result of a virgin queen out to be mated. If you caught this swarm and formed a new hive, it could result in a queen less hive. It is not a good idea to split too early in the year when the weather may turn cold. If you wait until too late to split a hive, it may result in a swarm.
When there is a wall to wall brood pattern and the hive is full, it is time to split, or make more room for your bees to prevent a swarm. Usually 4-5 weeks before the first honey flow is a good time to decide whether to split or make more room for your bees. If your goal is to have more honey, you don’t want to split too much. You may want to add more room. When making a split, the foundation goes on the top of the hive box. You should also feed the new split.
There are a lot of ways to make a split. The first mentioned Dave discussed was a “walk away split”. You take the top box off and move it away from the original hive. One box will have the queen. The other box will not. You need to make sure there are eggs in both boxes, or a queen will not be made in the queen-less box. This is a good way to split when you can’t find the queen. It is a quick and easy split. However, it also has the highest rate of failure and takes much longer to create a new hive. It can take as long as 6 weeks before there are new worker bees.
Most people do “mated queen splits”. You find the old queen. Isolate the queen before making the split using a queen excluder. Wait five days, if eggs are in the bottom hive, then that is where the queen is. You place a queen cage that has a newly mated queen inside the hive with no eggs. In 4-5 days the new queen should be out of the cage and laying. In this method you want most of the brood in the box where the new queen will be.
With the “mated queen split” you can also shake all the bees down into the bottom box, add the queen excluder. After a few hours, take off the top box with the bees that have moved up into it and add the new queen cage.
The third method Dave talked about was “queen cell splits”. It is like a “walk away split” with a queen cell you raised added to it. This method is used most by experienced beekeepers. The queen cells have to have a queen cell protector around them to protect the queen until she hatches out.
Whenever you make a nuc, it must be moved away from your home bee yard, or else they will fly back to the original hive, especially in cold weather.
Open brood has new, young bees. They are more likely to stay and accept new queens. Therefore, it is best to move the open brood into the newly created hive and leave the closed brood in the original hive.
James Fredrickson was the lucky winner of the nuc as donated by our club president, Devin. David, Scott and Chris also won various door prizes. The following were the prizes won: A frame feeder donated by Rosemary, a hive tool and queen cage donated by Randy, an inner cover and jar of honey donated by Devin, Thank you for all the door prize donations!
Hope to see you at our next meeting, May 19, 2026