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 (http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/showthread.php?85-Lazy-man-queen-rearing) has some ideas for increasing colony numbers.

[gavin]

That's some result especially with all that honey too.

Dave Cushman reports a method which ends up with as many nucs in a circle as you think the colony can stand:

http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/method2.html

In a good year two frames of bees with a queen cell in a polyhive and with as much feed as it wants will reach a good size for winter. So a double brood colony could give you 12+12 (Hoffmans with no dummy) therefore a dozen splits. The trouble is we haven't had a good year for a while. Maybe this time though?

You could just rely on the queen cells the colony makes rather than all that grafting. But I wouldn't do this with a single stock unless there are plenty of drones in the area.

That is all fantasy by the way. I started the association apiary last year with three full colonies. We now have seven and none are large. If the queen mating had gone well and the summer was a good one maybe we'd have had had 20 by now ... but unfortunately we don't.

[Jon]

It would not work like that with most colonies but that queen was very prolific and I had mated queens spare at the time which means that a nuc is up and running as soon as the queen gets released from the cage.

It should be possible to double colony numbers every year in a controlled manner ie not relying on collecting loads of swarms.
Oops but I forgot, according to the press the bees are dying!

[Neils]

Swarms are a mixed bag. When you've got no choice they can be better than having to shell out £150+ on a Nuc, but it's very much pot luck what you end up with. We had 4 swarms turn up in the apiary last year from sources unknown. One was lovely, two are mad as hell and are one step away from getting a jar of petrol if we can't get some queens sorted out sharpish. unless we get a repeat performance again I won't be going out of my way to get hold of any swarms.

[Troutnabout]

all this info and advice is great, so thanks again to everyone. But I do find it confusing, I'm a practical sort of person so can do stuff without much trouble if i can see it happening or in detailed photos, but visualizing what is needed from the written descriptions is very hard for me, especially on a computer screen.

I have had a look in my dad's old shed and can see 2 nucs, not sure how many frames they hold but I'm 99.9% sure he made them so both could fit side by side on a national brood box. i'll need to dig them out at the weekend and check them. From what i have read I'm thinking of putting the two nucs on the brood box to give the colony space, then making sure there are frames with queen cells, drones etc in the nucs, Putting the old queen in the bottom box under a queen excluder. Then when things settle, taking the nucs to another location for a while. Does this sound sensible? Will it reduce the likelihood of the old queen swarming?

I have a good number of brood boxes, supers, ekes, open mesh floors, roofs, crown boards and queen excluders and feeders. No fancy stuff, pollen traps, cloake boards etc. Easy to knock up in the workshop if needed though.

[Jon]

Troutandabout.
The nucs don't need to sit on the brood box. Nucs are for making up a new colony with its own queen rather than giving more space
If you are reusing old equipment be sure to scorch and sterilize it as foul brood spores can be viable for decades.
If you need to give the bees more space you can add a second brood box or a super but only do this when the current box is full of brood and bees.

The problem with beekeeping sometimes is too many options, some simple and some more complicated.
Your main options boil down to (a) waiting for you colony to make swarm preparations, ie queen cells, which you can use to make up nucs or (b) manipulating the colony so that it makes queen cells at the time of your choosing.
In your situation, with only one colony you need to be careful not to mess things up so you might be best to wait for natural queen cells to appear.
At this point do an artificial swarm and make up a couple of nucs with the brood and adhering bees.

[Troutnabout]

"Simple" sounds good to me Jon. Will leave well alone for another week and do more studying meantime. Option (a) sounds the most natural to me. In that situation, would a shook swarm be the best option to (possibly) prevent the old queen swarming?

[Jon]

Shook swarm is a different thing.
A shook swarm is typically for varroa mite control or sometimes for EFB and the idea is that you separate the bees from the brood combs which are either full of varroa or Larvae with EFB.

In your case to make increase it is an artificial swarm you need to do when you have queen cells.
The most common form of this would be to separate the colony into two parts, the queen with the flying bees (no brood) and the other part has brood and nurse bees plus queen cell(s).

Check out the Dave Cushman website which has simple explanations for all of this.

http://www.dave-cushman.net/index.html

[Troutnabout]

Had a look in the hive today, no progress with the queen cells, so the pressure is off for now. Queen is now laying on her third frame. Could not find her though, not many bees flying today so the hive was pretty full of bees.

I have stuck a super on the brood box, so I should hopefully have time to decide on how best to do an artificial swarm to go with the 2 nucs I hope to create. Hope the weather holds up, watch this space. should i give them some syrup now?

[Jon]

Queen is now laying on her third frame.

The time to add a super is when there is brood on 7 or 8 frames.
This sounds like a fairly small colony which should not have a super on yet.

[nemphlar]

I,ve been feeding syrup since the warm weather last week when they were packing in the pollen, can't think there's much to be gained disturbing them apart from topping up the feeder