# Increasing Hive Count By 10



## wfarler (Jul 9, 2003)

I guess this is possible - raising 900 queens isn't unbelievable. Ending up with 1000 viable hives sounds hard to achieve.

I have tried a 1:10 split with purchased queens and heavy feeding but with sorry results. I didn't try their approach to feeding pollen and honey (feeding anyone's honey but my own scares me). Not sure what Caspian Solution, unpublished contents bring out the skeptic in me, all I can say is caspianapiaries in Canada promotes it like you would promote a 'cure-all'.

The apimondia article fails to specify what pheromes are in the 'Caspian Solution'. I'm not sure which pheromes stimulate the hypopharangeal glands. The article states the feeding was to stimulate raising queen cells. I would think the bigger problem is how do you stimulate 1 hive of nurse/worker bees enough to raise 10 hives of brood? According to the article they were giving each nuc 2 frames of bees (not brood).

Raising queens doesn't sound like the challenge, it is figuring out how to stimulate the workers enough to raise 10x the normal brood.


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## Chef Isaac (Jul 26, 2004)

What happened with you 1:10 split?

I was thinking of doing something simular... like maybe a 1:5 split or something like that depends on how this winter works out.


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## peggjam (Mar 4, 2005)

I did a 12 to 50 split last year, with very mixed results. Some good, some very baaaaddddd. So far I still have 26 viable hives, we'll see when spring gets here. Most of my problems stemmed from robbing of my nucs, which once started is very hard to stop. The YJ's were a total pain in the butt.

You missed the paragraph that states 100 frames of brood and population that they bought.

[ January 10, 2006, 11:00 AM: Message edited by: peggjam ]


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## wfarler (Jul 9, 2003)

The 1:10 split ended up as exactly 1 hive the next spring. 
Inputs:
1 hive
10 queens
10 medium frames of honey
10 drawn frames
2 or 3 50lb bags of sugar
a lot of work

Output:
1 hive
No honey
10 almost empty frames of comb
10 moth damaged frames
10 empty queen cages (ha)
A pointless exercise.

1:4 split ended up as 3 strong hives the next spring (two were combined when a queen was lost)

Yes, robbing was a problem


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## franc (Jan 7, 2003)

During the summer way up north the days can be pretty long so that might help.


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## db_land (Aug 29, 2003)

I read somewhere about a beek that had high winter losses and needed to increase his hive count drastically. Basically, the process he used was to take 1 frame of brood (with bees) from each of 8 strong hives, a frame feeder of sugar syrup (as frame # 9) and a frame of foundation. He put these into a new hive and added a store-bought queen. He repeated this each week, starting about 6 weeks before the honey flow and continuing thru summer (with heavy feeding of 1:1 syrup). As soon as the queens started laying in the new hives, these hives also contributed 1 frame of brood per week. His contention was that 1 frame per week could be taken from a strong hive without reducing the hive's honey yield, was a good swarm control mechanism, and the resulting new hives would be strong enough from the git-go to produce honey or pollinate crops. As best I can recall he started with some multiple of 8 hives and had hundreds by August. I did the math: starting with 8 hives you would have 91 strong hives in 24 weeks.

I tried this last season, but didn't get started until about 2 weeks before the flow and chickened out when the flow started and I got too busy doing removals. Anyway, I completed two cycles and the resulting two hives each produced about 40lbs of honey and seem to be overwintering well.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>Basically, the process he used was to take 1 frame of brood (with bees) from each of 8 strong hives, a frame feeder of sugar syrup (as frame # 9) and a frame of foundation. He put these into a new hive and added a store-bought queen. 

That sounds very doable.


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## HARight (Jun 6, 2004)

Could you do this with 5 frame nucs? A. useing 2 frames brood, new queen, one frame foundation (frame with starter strip, maybe?),frame feeder and follower board to reduce space. or B. One frame brood, one frame of foundation or drawn comb or frame with starter strip(which?),frame feeder, follower board to temporally reduce space.
I am in south central NC. When could I start this process, assuming I can get queens. Any suggestions appreciated. Could I use nuc top feeders instead of the frame feeders, I prefer them.I use full size frames. Thanks.


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## peggjam (Mar 4, 2005)

HAR:

You can do anything you want, they're your bees. I bought some nucs last year that I noticed had capped queen cells in them when I went to move them into standred boxes. After being sure that there was a laying queen, I split each nuc in half, I should also note that this was about the middle of May, they did very well, and resulted in many more splits during the summer. I should say that honey production was not of prime concern, and because of continued splits, they produced no honey crop.


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## peggjam (Mar 4, 2005)

I should also note that capped queen cells are quite often found in nucs if the producer didn't take the time to destroy them pior to installing queens. This will sometimes result in the rejection of the installed queen, so before killing these queen cells it is best to make sure there is a laying queen.


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## ikeepbees (Mar 8, 2003)

http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman/increase.html


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

You can make a split all the way down to a two frame nuc and probably have it survive. But there is a point of "critical mass" where the number of bees is enough that they can easily thrive, instead of struggling. Once they reach that point they take off quicker. Five frames makes a nice size split that will build up to critical mass quicker than less will. Ten frames of brood and honey and bees will reach that even sooner. A booming hive can rear more brood than a struggling nuc. That's why I think the plan to steal a frame of brood every week from ten strong hives makes a lot of sense. The strong hive stay strong and continue to raise a lot of brood. The split is big enough to thrive and not just struggle.


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