# Splitting a hot hive?



## 4boysbees (May 21, 2012)

Got a question for y'all. I've got a hot hive, real hot, but they are honey making machines! I was thinking of splitting the hive down into at least 4 nucs trying to settle them down a little and hopefully keep the honey making genetics. I would let two make their own queen and add a queen to the other two(mainly as an experiment to see what happens)Any opinions or suggestions?


----------



## Tenbears (May 15, 2012)

It just seems to go that the best honey producers are a bit hot. If you split them and allow them to make their own queen you will most likely have 4 hot hives. To control hot hives re-queen with a gentle queen in 42 days the hive will become gentle. If you split with Store bought queens the splits will be gentle, as long as the queens comes from gentle stock.


----------



## hilreal (Aug 16, 2005)

I have the same issue. As I understand it, most of the "hotness" comes from the drone side of the mating. I split mine into 3, keeping the original queen in a smaller hive (I cut it down to a single deep with a queen excluder to keep her population manageable, still loading in the honey) and allowed 2 to raise queens. The 2 splits have calmed down and are reasonable to handle....NOW the jury is still out on their honey production. I saw an article recently that said that if you put an entrance reducer on a hot hive it will often calm them down considerably. Going to try that too and see if it helps.


----------



## GOODMAN VALLEY HONEY (Jul 4, 2012)

I have always heard that if you split a hot hive you will get more hot hives, but,, I had a hot hive last year and did a 3 way split, let two of them raise their own queen and both were average tempered hives. The mother queen survived the winter and became much hotter. We could not go out into the bee yard without having an escort. I got her from a package bee production place in Ga. and she continued to get worse. Four weeks ago I split that hive and placed new queens I had raised in each. She went to an early grave. ( just not early enough) I walked away with 49 stingers in my pant legs alone. All of them are doing fine now. If you can get a hot queen from the regular queen out there, I guess you can get a regular queen from a hot queen, or at least that has been my experience.


----------

