# Walk away split



## RiodeLobo (Oct 11, 2010)

As I understand it the best queens are raised on fresh comb, ample stores, good drone populations and lots of nurse bees. From reading the general impression i get is that walk away split queens are on average lower quality.

My question is for the small time hobby guys raising 1-10 queens/year does that have to be true? Instead of grafting or cutting comb techniques couldn't you provide all the same circumstances (perhaps not the drones if you only have a couple hives) in a split. Make sure they have lots of pollen and honey, are on a flow, pack the split with lots of young bees and make sure that the frame with the 1-2 day old larvae are on a frame of fresh comb.


Would this get you good quality queens without the extra work of the other techniques? Of course I realize this wouldn't be anywhere as efficient as other ways, but if you are raising a couple of queens efficiency really doesn't matter to much.

Thanks
Dan


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## peacekeeperapiaries (Jun 23, 2009)

Why would they be poor quality??? Bees have been making "their own" queens for quite a while now. IMO a healthy split provided plenty of bees, and stores will make just as good a queen on their own as popping a cell in there from either your own grafting or purchase from somewhere else. I know may people who do walk away splits and we have done some ourselves I see no difference in quality. We purchase breeder queens and have some of our own stock which we graft for our re-queening, and splits, but if I were just doing a few I would not hesitate to do a walk away split, and have in the past. Just make sure they have all the essentials and a frame with some eggs....the bees will handle it from there.


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## Velbert (Mar 19, 2006)

I would use a nice swarm cell it will be one of the best raised


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Scratch a piece out of the comb, right down to the foundation but leave the foundation. Do it so there's eggs or just hatched larvae in the row of cells straight above the bit you scratched. 

The bees will normally build cells from that row because they have room to build the cells straight down & provided it's a strong motivated colony with food on hand, they will be good cells.


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

Second to the swarm cells. Just take the queen you want to make new queens from, put her in a nuc, feed them til they make swarm cells. You can cut the cells out, or just use the frames as they are to start new nucs. You could get a dozen queen cells a pop. Less work, good quality queens.


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## beeware10 (Jul 25, 2010)

many beekeepers think they know more than the bees. we have produced hundreds of good nucs in south carolina with walk away splits. you need a good honey and pollen flow. it may not be the best way, but it is the least expensive. remember the bees know what they are doing.


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## RiodeLobo (Oct 11, 2010)

WiredForStereo said:


> Second to the swarm cells. Just take the queen you want to make new queens from, put her in a nuc, feed them til they make swarm cells. You can cut the cells out, or just use the frames as they are to start new nucs. You could get a dozen queen cells a pop. Less work, good quality queens.


I have read about the swarm cell technique. One thing i am unclear on. How do you stop them from swarming after you harvest the swarm cells you want?

Thanks Dan


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

The simplest way is to just dismantle the nuc and start a slew of new nucs with it. There won't be a hive left to swarm. Removing the swarm cells, and several frames of brood, and/or shaking off a bunch of the nurse bees to start new nucs will simulate a swarm. Of course you'll need frames of brood and bees from other hives to round them out.

It's kind of the same concept as splitting to simulate swarming, you're just separating out the queen cells so you can get more queens out of the deal.

Even if it does swarm, if you're attentive, you should still be able to catch them before all the swarm cells hatch, and cut out the cells. In that case, you'd leave a cell for the nuc of origin.


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## RiodeLobo (Oct 11, 2010)

Thank you all for the responses.

Dan


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

You are on the right track. Make sure they are well fed and they can be very good queens. Crowding any bees is a great start. Cutting out queen cells and distributing them is a way to maximize the output with the same resources. One hive will make quite a few queen cells.

The underlying concept of queen rearing is to get the most number of queens from the least resources from the genetics chosen for the traits you want. In most queen rearing scenarios we are attempting to make the least number of bees queenless for the least amount of time and resulting in the most number of quality laying queens when we are done.


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## CES (Feb 4, 2009)

RiodeLobo said:


> From reading the general impression i get is that walk away split queens are on average lower quality.


Walk away splits can produce poor quality queens but they don't have to. The bees know they must produce an emergency queen when they realize they are queenless. They may start feeding royal jelly to too old of larva as well as freshly hatched larva. If this happens you get a poor quality queen.

Here is how you remedy that. On the 4th day after the split, examine the nuc and see if you have any queen cells that are capped. If you do, you will end up with a poor queen. The larva was too old when the bees started the "royal" treatment. Queen cells are capped on the 9th day after the egg is layed. 

Look and see if there are also uncapped queen cells. Usually you will find them. Destroy the capped cells. Leave no more than 2 or 3 uncapped cells. This allows the nurse bees to do a better job finishing off those queen cells.

This will give you the best queen possible from the genetics she is coming from.

CES


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## johng (Nov 24, 2009)

You have gotten some excellent advice. I have experimented with some splits. One thing that has worked really well for me is I take the origianl queen and a few frames of bees and move them to a nuc. Then I let the origianl production hive make itself a new queen. What I have found is that the full size hive can requeen itself with a quality queen becuase they have plenty of resources. If I split early enough in the year the nuc will still build up enough to make honey also. I make sure I see drones flying before I make the splits.


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

Did that last year, from those two hives I got more honey than any of the other ones. However, the hive at the original location did not survive the winter. Instead of a five frame nuc, I put the five frames and queen in a 10 frame deep. Built up to six deeps from mostly foundation, harvested most of three (I don't harvest from the bottom three.)

I won't be splitting them again, that queen makes for a pretty mean hive (even if they produce well.) I don't think I will requeen them either, I guess I'm greedy and thick skinned.


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## Truchaos (Jun 30, 2008)

I have a 'super hive' that is a real survivor of all the ills that have come to my bee yard. It produces an enormous quantity of bees each spring, doesn't have mites and no beetles, despite a complete beetle invasion of my bee yard last season after I bought several Russian packages from Georgia. I have produced quite a few nucs from it and currently have three nucs (all survived the winter) which I produced from that hive last year. Those nucs are at another location so the beetles didn't destroy them last season.

Walk away splits don't always work but they do work often enough. The success rate for me seems to be higher if you feed them as much as they will take early and for as long as they will take it, especially during the hottest part of the summer. The presence of an abundance of available food seems to really stimulate population growth which is critical going into the fall and winter months. Too many beekeepers wait until the fall to feed splits and by then its too late. 

Early last summer I attended a lecture given by a master beekeeper who produces and sells packaged bees. He said, it's impossible for a non-commercial operation to produce viable queens. He said that if the average bee keeper produces queens they will be of poor quality and the hives will quickly fail. He added that a bee keeper MUST replace all his/her queens each year to maintain healthy colonies. Then at the end of the lecture he added, I'll have plenty of queens this year for anyone who is interested. So the real lesson from this lecture was, be careful of the ulterior motives of those who give you advice.


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## rkr (Oct 30, 2008)

Truchaos said:


> So the real lesson from this lecture was, be careful of the ulterior motives of those who give you advice.


Amen, I attended a beginning beekeepers class and asked about timing for walk away splits and got the same answer "don't try that!!! You need to buy your queens, Go see "so and so" after the class." I was disappointed. I don't know why they did not answer the question and add their pitch at the end. They did that several times, redirected the question but did not answer the question. :doh: 

The question was asked "how do you keep them from swarming?" I had a hive that I split all the way down to a 6 frame nuc and they still built swarm cells. I ended up taking that queen over to a friend’s house and let them finish on their mission; but this time to requeen. Sometimes you just can't turn them away from swarming. Maybe if I had cut them down to 4 or 2 frames they would have quit building cells.

That’s why I love this site so much,
RKR


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## Solomon Parker (Dec 21, 2002)

Truchaos said:


> So the real lesson from this lecture was, be careful of the ulterior motives of those who give you advice.


Glad you picked up on that.

If you have more than a couple hives, I recommend inducing a swarm. Reduce the open space in the hive, then feed. When they make queen cells, cut them out and make nucs. Or don't cut them and just separate the frames into nucs. Swarm cells tend to be more reliable than walk away splits because there is not an emergency condition.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

Funny how people come to opposite conclusions. 

Here are my conclusions (from my site):

"Why rear your own queens?

"Cost. A typical queen costs the beekeeper about $20 counting shipping and may cost considerably more.

"Time. In an emergency you order a queen and it takes several days to make arrangements and get the queen. Often you need a queen yesterday. If you have some in mating nucs, on hand, then you already have a queen.

"Availability. Often when you need a queen there are none available from suppliers. Again, if you have one on hand availability is not a problem.

"AHB. Southern raised queens are more and more from Africanized Honey Bee areas. In order to keep AHB out of the North we should stop importing queens from those areas.

"Acclimatized bees. It's unreasonable to expect bees bred in the deep South to winter well in the far North. Local feral stock is acclimatized to our local climate. Even breeding from commercial stock, you can breed from the ones that winter well here.

"Mite and disease resistance. Tracheal mite resistance is an easy trait to breed for. Just don't treat and you'll get resistant bees. Hygienic behavior, which is helpful to avoid AFB (American Foulbrood) and other brood diseases as well as Varroa mite problems, is also easy to breed for by testing for hygienic behavior in our breeder queens. And yet hardly any queen breeders are breeding for these traits. The genetics of our queens if far too important to be left to people who don't have a stake in their success. People selling queens and bees actually make more money selling replacement queens and bees when the bees fail. Now I'm not saying they are purposely trying to raise queens that fail, but I am saying they have no financial incentive to produce queens that don't. Basically to cash in on the benefits of not treating, you need to be rearing your own queens.

"Quality. Nothing is more important to success in beekeeping than the queen. The quality of your queens can often surpass that of a queen breeder. You have the time to spend to do things that a commercial breeder cannot afford to do. For instance, research has shown that a queen that is allowed to lay up until it's 21 days will be a better queen with better developed ovarioles than one that is banked sooner. A longer wait will help even more, but that first 21 days is much more critical. A commercial queen producer typically looks for eggs at two weeks and if there are any it is banked and eventually shipped. You can let yours develop better by spending more time. "


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Michael Bush said:


> And yet hardly any queen breeders are breeding for these traits. The genetics of our queens if far too important to be left to people who don't have a stake in their success. *People selling queens and bees actually make more money selling replacement queens and bees when the bees fail*. Now I'm not saying they are purposely trying to raise queens that fail, but I am saying they have no financial incentive to produce queens that don't. Basically to cash in on the benefits of not treating, you need to be rearing your own queens.


Sorry, can't agree with much of that. Certainly wasn't my attitude when I was in the business, a shame to see new gullible heads being indoctrinated.


Many hobbyists aspire to one day going full time with bees. If they achieve that and sell queens, do they automatically have a personanlity change from bee lovers, to rip off artists?


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

While I agree with much of what MB says I would tend to agree with OT that he may have overreached a bit on at least one point. I know there are many diligent breeders that have work hard on producing a quality product that results not just in good bees but return customers.


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## gregstahlman (Oct 7, 2009)

i have grown quite tired of the stereotype that "southern queens are junk and full of AHB". seems like a broken record that is played over and over and over and over. many of "us" here is the south are not in AHB areas and work very hard to produce quality queens. i don't sell anything that i wouldn't use myself. in fact, sometimes we do use our own caged queens to make some hives up.


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## rrussell6870 (May 14, 2009)

I had written a huge post in response to the insulting remarks... but of course, the wireless glitched as I clicked post, thus losing the whole thing...:waiting:

Instead of typing it all over again, I will just simply say that I am a SOUTHERN, BIG COMMERCIAL BREEDER... and I have been selecting for resistances since the first sign of mites... I openly teach how to rear QUALITY queens with RESISTANCES... and my family (as well as many others that were insulted at once) has been keeping, studying, and producing bees in the US for well over 100 years... we did not get to where we are in this industry by selling junk... That is far from the way the industry works... We could NEVER produce as many queens as we can sell... as my dad used to say "Who the heck banks??? They are all sold well before they are created!" 

As to quality, we have been providing queens to EVERYWHERE (especially the north) since the beginning.... where are the complaints??? With queens heading many thousands of hives, there are plenty of people to attest to quality, yet still no complaints... :scratch: 

We have never had AHB any where near our locations (and that covers a very large area).

You struck a nerve with those "anti Hard-working bee keeper" statements. There are COMPANIES (notice, I did not say "breeders" for a reason), out there that resell and even produce "junk" queens... the rest of us are here because we have great products... they are here because some still buy the bottom dollar queens, which is fine if that is what they want to do... but as a breeder, I will not accept the blame for someone elses bees having to be treated or dying from mites, diseases, winter, stupidity, or whatever reason... "Spend a dollar to save a penny"... thats the results of "junk" queens... 

Please do not point a crooked finger... be direct about which "breeders" you are accusing... the rest of us do not appreciate the insults.

To answer the question about walk-away splits... here is a link to an earlier thread that may help...
beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?t=249524


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

Let's do the exact same quote and change the emphasis:

"People selling queens and bees actually make more money selling replacement queens and bees when the bees fail. *Now I'm not saying they are purposely trying to raise queens that fail, but I am saying they have no financial incentive to produce queens that don't.*"


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## chillardbee (May 26, 2005)

CES said:


> Walk away splits can produce poor quality queens but they don't have to. The bees know they must produce an emergency queen when they realize they are queenless. They may start feeding royal jelly to too old of larva as well as freshly hatched larva. If this happens you get a poor quality queen.
> 
> CES


CES has a good point here. you truly do want the bees to rear a queen from the youngest possible larva. In nature, the most common requeening takes place as a supercedure or swarm cells, very seldom as emergency cells. emergency cells has the potential produce some of the best queens but also the worst queens too if your not careful to give them the right resources. I've found that in making nucs, it is an advantage to make sure that i gave them fresh eggs, the fresher the better. that way, when the egg hatches 2-3 days later, they start feeding it heavily right at the start. it's important to get no younger larva in the frames making up the nuc so that they won't rear a queen from an older larva.


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## rrussell6870 (May 14, 2009)

The breeding industry is based on reputation... there is nothing but "financial incentive" for commercial breeders to produce quality queens... junk queens are sold by COMPANIES just as quickly as quality queens are sold by BREEDERS... the difference is that the junk queens are sold for a far lower price and since most of these companies are resellers, the mark up is very low to begin with... just to be clear, most of the resellers do not get their queens from large breeders... haven't for quite some time now... they get these queens from huge networks of sideliners and migratory operations that downsize after pollenation... its easy to identify these... they are the ones that do not give any info about their queens... true breeders invest more time, resources, and research in their products than anyone else... it is the requirement of success. Broad attacks on those who truly serve this industry is not what I expect from an intelligent man.


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## AstroBee (Jan 3, 2003)

The financial incentive is clearly next year's business and the year after that. Sure, fly-by-night groups have no financial incentive, but those in it for the long haul have lots of incentive - it is their livelihood. This is hardly different than many other trades. If you don't consistently produce a quality product then you're not going to be doing business very long.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>Broad attacks on those who truly serve this industry is not what I expect from an intelligent man. 

I apologize if it came across that way. It was not intended as an attack, it was intended as encouragement for people to raise their own queens. I am sorry if it came across as an attack. 

Certainly there _are_ those who take great pride in their queens and work hard to get high quality queens.


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## rrussell6870 (May 14, 2009)

Thank you. I respect your motives, just wish you had chosen better methods. I certainly agree that every bee keeper should try their hand at selection and rearing... I feel that our industry would benefit greatly by this, if for no other reason than a better understanding of honey bee genetics and what it takes for a colony to maintain quality nutrition for optimal health (something that is rarely mentioned is how quality nutrition effects the health, productivity, and gentleness of the workers just as it does for the queens)...

Turning people away from good breeders is not the way to get there though... one of the greatest benefits of purchased queens from quality breeders is the ample lineages that are available... for small time producers that do not have enough lineages in their operation to successfully mate their queens without inbreeding each season, losses in survivability, production, etc, will eventually ensue... I agree that there are many poorly managed companies that sell queens to their customers that are all grafted from the same few hives, causing their customers to have all sisters in their yards and this issue is most likely the largest culprit in queen quality decline over the last few decades. The second being the lack of drones available during mating, which also can be trouble for small operations... but neither issue is a reason not to try to raise a few queens... its simply "good bee keeping" to take every opportunity that you can to learn from, and better understand your bees.


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## kilocharlie (Dec 27, 2010)

Funny how the same principles apply to buying products made in communist China, whose motives seem more like those of the quick buck "ripoff artists", and who also happens to be your political enemy, versus buying at home from a reputable manufacturer. The differences: the junk made in China has only one advantage - lower initial price (due to cheaper materials, lower standards, "slave" labor, cutting corners, etc.); the reputable, local craftsman makes something I'd be proud to own, and that he truly hopes will outperform all competitors' products, and will last forever.

It also goes for who you hire, the illegal or the journeyman? CHEAP WORK AIN'T GOOD, GOOD WORK AIN'T CHEAP!


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