# split???



## dickm (May 19, 2002)

Welcome Jose,
It will be good to get your input on things. 

All beekeeping is local. Here in NE US we feed in the early spring to get a good population going for the flow. This often requires me to split my NWCs to prevent swarming and to make increase. If swarming is not an issue with you I'd wait until after the flow so as to get a good crop. You will need to keep a sharp eye out for the first sign of swarm cells and split then.
If you have new young queens installed you may get away with it. 

Dickm


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

If your flow is just starting and you pull almost all the brood off with the old queen, honey and pollen and make a split, leaving the old hive (old location) at least one frame with some eggs and larvae and a little bit of honey and pollen, you'll have a kind of cut down split. The old hive should have half as many brood boxes and you pile on the supers. The new hive has the rest of the brood boxes and probably won't need but one super because it has no foragers because the foragers will all return to the old hive. The old have will have more foragers available and no brood to care for and will make more honey than it would have without the split. The old hive will have no foragers but will have lots of brood and a queen and a flow to get itself established on. Essentially you just did an artificial swarm.

The whole point is to free up foragers to get honey instead of feeding brood.

Two weeks BEFORE the flow would have been better timing, but right AT the flow will work ok.


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## dickm (May 19, 2002)

Mike, that's elegant.

Dickm


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## Dave W (Aug 3, 2002)

>that's elegant
and thats why he is "MrBEE".


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## stangardener (Mar 8, 2005)

is there something about going in four days later and removing the first queen cells?


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

If you want to cut out the CAPPED queen cells at four days it will insure that the right aged larvae was used by the bees. Don't cut out all the queen cells or you won't get a queen for the split.


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## Jose Rosas (Nov 24, 2005)

thanks a lot to all. michael your opinions were very clear to me.

regards,

Jose Rosas


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## dickm (May 19, 2002)

Mike,
In the split you describe, the origional hive gets open frames of young brood but no queen. They start queen cells. If you go back in four days and cut out capped cells.....leaving the others....how does that ensure larva of a better age were used. Seems to me that the cells started later, and still uncapped, would have been from older larva which would not be optimal. This puzzles me in the demaree system which says the same thing. It was explained at EAS that if you cut out cells, the next batch being more of an emergency nature, get much more royal jelly.

Dickm


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>If you go back in four days and cut out capped cells.....leaving the others....how does that ensure larva of a better age were used.

It's when a larvae reaches a certain level of maturity that they cap the cell. If they start with a four day old (from the time the egg was laid) it will get capped four days after you made them queenless (8 days after the egg was laid). If they start with a three day old (from the time the egg was laid) it will get capped five days after you made them queenless (8 days after the egg was laid).

>Seems to me that the cells started later, and still uncapped, would have been from older larva which would not be optimal.

No. They are all started at the same time as far as making queen cells. The older they are the sooner they get capped. The younger the larve the later they get capped.

>This puzzles me in the demaree system which says the same thing. It was explained at EAS that if you cut out cells, the next batch being more of an emergency nature, get much more royal jelly.

Making it an emergency is the whole problem with this kind of queen rearing in the first place. The bees, when they plan, always use the right aged larve. The bees when put in an emergency do what they can. IMO, making it LESS of an emergency is the right direction such as swarm cells or supercedure cells are.

Jay Smith theorized that the reason emergency cells aren't as good isn't that the bees don't pick the right aged larvae but because they can't tear down the cell wall on old brood comb because of the cocoons. Jay says, they would, if they could, use the right age larvae but they get stuck with whatever they can work with. Often floating a larvae out of the cell over to the mouth and building a cell down from there, rather than tearing down a wall like they would prefer. You could look for the right aged larvae and tear down the bottom cell walls on five or six of them.


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## dickm (May 19, 2002)

Thanks Mike,
This is sort of a subtle point and you have explained so that even I understand it.

Dickm


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## Aspera (Aug 1, 2005)

I'm pretty sure that bees know the correct age larva to select. In fact, there has been some interesting work showing that the dominent group of workers will preferentially select their full sister to be raised as the future queen. If I had to geuss why emergency queens don't do as well, I would geuss that it is more related to the colony's strength and ability to feed the future queen. Aren't vigorous colonies are always the best choice for queen rearing?


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

> Aren't vigorous colonies are always the best choice for queen rearing? 

Absolutely.


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