So each year my goal is to increase the number of colonies that I have. Just for reference colonies are a group of bees with the queen, not the physical boxes which are basically hives, or at least that is how I view this.
So each spring bees normally would start to increase in their population with the goal of eventually being able to have enough bees that they could then swarm and reproduce. As a beekeeper this means that part of the honey producing force is lost if they fly away. It isn't a bad thing, unless you want to be able to make more honey. So one strategy to prevent this is splitting the colony so that you create two or more colonies from the single colony. So as the weather has been starting to level out this year I decided that it was time to split one of my hives with the hopes of creating more colonies.
So I spent the morning shaking bees and looking for the queen with the hope that I could get enough resources and the right age larvae to produce two or more colonies from the single hive. Well as usual with the bees that I caught at my parents last year I was surprised on how far they had come. There seemed to be enough bees and larvae that I split the colony into a total of four colonies. One has the old queen, one is in the old location with a bunch of bees, and the last two are in one physical hive that is split into two compartments so that two colonies can live next to each other. Now the waiting game ensues. The queen takes 16 days to hatch from an egg, and then usually a total of 21 days before she goes out to mate and comes back. So if everything works out by the end of May I should have four total hives from one.
So I will let you know how things turn out from here.
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