Increasing hive numbers

[Troutnabout]

My worst nightmare has happened, I'm down to one hive. Overwintered two but one, has just chucked in the towel. No queen, eggs etc and about 2 frames of bees left. It was hard work keeping it going last year, so I'm not surprised its fallen at the last fence. Anyway, my son ever the optimist say we will just need to start again. Fortunately the hive we have is looking very strong, its been working for a good 4 weeks and the air in the garden has been thick with bees all weekend. I have not opened is up yet as this is the 1st decent spell of weather and the next door neighbour has been working in his garden barely 10 feet from the hive.

Anyway, the question ...... what is the best way for a novice like me to increase the number of hives I have. Its a national hive, single broodbox, and the bees are probably carnies, the queen hatched out in the second half of last June. I'll move the hive to a farm tomorrow night and get a look in to it on Tuesday afternoon.

PS I have not fed the surviving hive since I took the feeder off them at the back end of last year, the hive that just died did get an early feed to try and get it going.

[gavin]

Check the stores in the survivor. Some have been very light as they've been raising brood like there's no tomorrow (which might be the case for them if they're not careful).

Carnies tend to have an explosive build-up in spring, more so than others. Check to see how well they are doing and if they are strong, I'd ....

- give them a second brood box, then ...
- you could build them up to a super or two then if powerful encourage Q cells by separating a brood box of eggs and young brood above super(s) with the old queen with the rest of sealed brood below, under a Q excluder
- or deliberately leave them short of space to induce overcrowding and Q cells
- then split in various ways, depending on whether or not you would like some honey too

Lots of possibilities, but they depend on a vigorous colony and oher bees in your area producing drones.

[Neils]

sorry to hear that Trout.

I'd say that the easiet way to increase would be to use your surviving colony's impulse to swarm and to use an Artificial Swarm to split the colony in two. There are other options available, but from a Novice perspective and perhaps not having access to lots of kit (obviously you need and, by the sounds of it, have a second hive going spare at the moment) aiming to simply split a colony in two should be relatively straight forward.

I'm pretty sure we've got more than a few threads on artificial swarming that go over the steps for various methods, but working with the bees would be my suggestion for a simple method to be able to split your colony into two.

[Jon]

And apart from anything formally planned re increase, get a few bait hives out and about. Even if you capture crap bees you can always requeen with something better. This will be a year of early swarms as the forage is early, colonies are strong and a lot of beekeepers seem to be feeding like crazy.

[chris]

but working with the bees would be my suggestion

After all, the bees know best

[Troutnabout]

Thanks for the advice folks. I don't know of any other hives anywhere near my hive. How critical is this re: other hives and production of drones as per Gavin's post.

[gavin]

If your bees were *really* isolated (which I doubt) theory states that the first generation may be fine but beyond that you may have difficulties.

A queen can carry a lot of diversity in the sperm she carries, but if the next generation mates only with her brothers then the stage is set for a lot of genetic bottlenecking. There is a *very* long thread on it if you are interested.

Don't worry too much but if the vigour drops and the brood has lots of holes without an obvious reason (chalkbrood or high levels of Varroa) then your bees may be too inbred. Swapping queens with someone with compatible bees could be a solution in that case.

[Troutnabout]

thanks gavin. this will be the 5th year since the current queen's ancestors will have definitely been exposed to drones from another familly so to speak. She is probably a grandaughter of that queen - it makes sense to me

[Troutnabout]

had a look in the hive this afternoon expecting to have to feed the bees. Bees are working on all the frames, sealed honey, pollen,, eggs and brood, even a queen cup.

I'd like to end the year with at least two more hives giving me three hives, whats the best approach?

[Jon]

whats the best approach?

I would wait for queen cells to appear and do an artificial swarm.
Depending upon how strong the colony is, you could split it into two or three at this point.
The easiest way to make three would be to leave the old queen with the flying bees on the current site and make up two nucs with the brood and nurse bees, making sure that each nuc has one good queen cell.

I had a big colony in the garden which gave me 100lbs of honey last year and was then split into 4.
It swarmed on the 1st July with a clipped queen which made it back to the hive.
At that point I split it in two leaving the clipped queen with the flying bees on the original site.
I introduced a mated queen to the other part.
By the end of August the old queen had built up the colony quite well and I split it into 3 nucs.
The old queen stayed in one of them and the other two each got an introduced mated queen.
All 4 of them are still going well and I saw the original clipped queen yesterday when I checked her nuc.
These nucs are covering 5 or 6 frames and will be full colonies by the end of April.

EDIT
This thread has some ideas for increasing colony numbers.