The Basics of Splitting Hives - Creating Nucs

Paul Kelly, is an Apiarist that works in the Field Laboratory, at the Department of Environmental Biology, at the University of Guelph, Ontario.


He attended our Beekeeper's meeting this month (Middlesex, Elgin & Oxford Beekeepers' Association) and he talked about some of the studies and surveys carried out over the last two years and gave a demonstration on how to create splits to make up for winter losses.

I did my best to take notes - so I can't guarantee they are completely accurate.

Also, sorry I have no photo of Paul to show from the meeting, but here's a photo of him from the summer when he won the bee beard competition at Clovermead's Apiaries (blog from 19 Feb 2009 - http://thebeejournal.blogspot.com/2009_02_01_archive.html).

My excuse for the lack of photos is that I was too focused on chatting with the beekeepers' and bidding in the Silent Auction to take photos. But I did win this amazing book printed in 1935 and a box of past issues of Bee Culture magazine. SCORE!!! This book is still in print and I have a new copy but it was a real thrill to get an old copy for my bee book collection. (the other photos below are from the book and don't relate to Paul's talk).

In Ontario, it is agreed that hives need to have their fall treatment done in August. Waiting to Sept/Oct is too late and a couple beekeepers who reported losses of 80% had done their treatments after Aug.

Paul mentioned that making up splits is essential to help make up for colony losses.

Note that these notes apply to beekeeping in Ontario. April and May is too early to create splits because the bees have not built up their population yet. The methods to divide a colony vary considerably, depending on the circumstances.

A new colony needs to be a full strong colony by the fall. It can be determined to be a full and strong colony if it has created a surplus of honey.

Splits should be done in late May/June and not after June. Splits that are done earlier will be smaller splits.

There are two kinds of colonies: 1 = Product and 2 = Replacements for Losses.

When dividing a hive and introducing a new queen, use light smoke so as to not scatter the bees.

Find the queen: Remove the second frame from the deep to be divided to create some space. Scan the frames quickly for the queen - looking for differences. Remove another frame and look down in box at the frames - the queen will avoid light and most often she'll be in the box moving to the next frame. Focus only on looking for the queen and nothing else. Once the queen is found, either put her in a queen cage or set the frame aside (Paul recommended resting the queen frame in front of the entrance so that if she falls off the frame she can go back inside the hive.

For the new nucleus hive, pick frames from the strong hive with both brood and bees--2 frames as a minimum. In June 3 to 4 frames are used to create a nuc. You will need to add bees too by shaking bees from some of the other frames because there will not be enough bees on the just the frames alone to keep the cluster warm during the cool nights. Also add an empty frame to the nuc plus 1 or 2 frames of honey and pollen.

Honey supers are put on the 1st of May, otherwise the deep will become overcrowded.

Paul puts a screen over the entrance of the new nuc hive to keep the bees inside the nuc box and he recommends taking it to another bee yard (another location farther than 3 kms) if possible. This would prevent the bees from straying back to their original hive.

One or two days later you can introduce a local queen. He did not recommend letting a weak colony raise it's own queen, stating that a weak colony won't raise a good queen.

If the new nuc is left longer than a week without a new queen introduced, they will create their own queen cells.

On the second day, open the screen from the front to release the bees. They will reorient themselves to their new location.

After introducing the queen, do not disturb the hive for one full week. If you open the hive before one week, the bees might ball and kill the queen.

After one week, when doing an inspection, it's not necessary to look for the queen. Just look for eggs.

A question was asked about letting the bees create their own queen and Paul's comment was that if bees are left to create their own queen, the bees will become mean.

Cryopreservation of Bee Spermatozoa

Megan Taylor, B.Sc.(H), M.Sc from the Apiculture lab at the University of Guelph who has been studying under Dr. Ernesto Guzman has finalized her thesis on the cryopreservation of honey bee spermatozoa. She graciously agreed to share the results of her study with our club.

I took notes from her talk and she kindly edited my notes and I’ve pasted her edited version below. Really the credit belongs to her since she did all the research. Thank you Megan!

The focus of her study was the question: Can bee sperm be successfully preserved long-term?

Ms. Taylor discussed the reasons why research needed to be done on the cryopreservation of bee spermatozoa - to improve the strains, preservation of current stocks, transportation of genetic material, the ability to conduct studies all year and not just in summer, and full mating control.

Mature drones embark on mating flights in the afternoon, and head to their drone congregation areas, aerially located 10-60 meters above ground, where they would wait for a queen on a mating flight. She found drones were more sexually mature from July to mid August at the age of 12 days or older. (Young drones don’t contain any semen, older ones have more. However, later in the season, the sexually mature drones appeared to contain less semen than the sexually mature drones from earlier in the season.)

Generally, by mid afternoon there would only be immature drones in the hive as the mature drones will have flown off to drone congregation areas.

(photo - a few members of the Elgin, Oxford and Middlesex Beekeeper's Assocation).

The queens will mate once they are 5 to 6 days old and she will mate with between 6 to 20 drones. When mating with the queen, after the drone has ejaculated the semen, its mucous may act as a plug inside the queen.

Drones ejaculate a very tiny amount of semen that is highly concentrated with between 8 to 11 million sperm. Drones only ejaculate and therefore mate once during their mating flight, after which they will die. The queen will save about 10% of the sperm from each drone she mates with, holding between 4 to 7 million sperm in her spermatheca. Drones produce between 8 to 11 billion sperm in one micro litre which isn't that much, but compared to other creatures it's one of the, if not the most concentrated of all.

It was noted that bee sperm left just sitting on a shelf for 3 months with no form of treatment still had sperm which could be seen moving under a microscope.

There has not been any recent studies done on honey bee spermatozoa cryopreservation since 1984 (Kaftanoglu and Peng, 1984).

Previous experiments with liquid nitrogen (-196 degrees Celsius) discovered that there was some damage to the membrane of the sperm and their tails would split (Peng et al., 1992).

In Ms. Taylor’s experiment, diluents were used containing amino acid, antibiotics and glucose for energy, and different cryoprotectants to improve the storage of the sperm. She pooled semen from multiple drones and added different amounts to test collection ratio. She experimented with 7 diluent solutions, 3 different cryoprotectants and 5 collection ratios.

Cryoprotectants and diluents did reduce cellular damage and improved the post thaw viability of sperm. A similar freezing protocol used for the cryopreservation of swine sperm was used for the bees and this was very successful. The sperm did survive the cryopreservation. The results of the cryopreservation were greater than 60% viability.

The next step was to fertilize queens with the sperm. This process proved to be very difficult and not all the queens survived (acceptance when reintroduced in the hive seemed to be an issue - and there was speculation whether the workers knew the queen was not in a good condition or was damaged in some way).

Ms. Taylor was able to successfully instrumentally inseminate one queen with cryopreserved semen and found that the sperm had migrated to the queen’s spermatheca and were even still motile when observed under the microscope. The results are very promising and further study will need to be carried out.

Ms. Taylor’s results will be published this spring in the scientific journal called “Theriogenology”.

Bee Books I've Read

As part of my research for the children's book about honey bees that I'm writing/illustrating I've been doing all kinds of research in an attempt to become as knowedgeable about bees as I can ...well bee...

The internet has proven to be a treasure trove of information and photographs and I'm grateful to each and every person who took the time from their busy life to post their expereinces, information, research, photos, funnies, stories and comments about bees and beekeeping.

I've also read a selection of books which I've done reviews for on amazon.com which I thought I'd mention here:

• Beekeeping for Dummies


• The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture


• Natural Beekeeping


• Hive Management


• DVD - Bees - Tales from the Hive

(http://www.amazon.ca/gp/community-content-search/results/ref=cm_srch_q_col_rpli/?query=beekeeping&search-alias=rp-listmania)

If you're completely new to beekeeping I would recommend Beekeeping for Dummies. I found this book interesting and easy to read. The author doesn't assume you understand all the bee related terminology and explains the terms well. He takes you through from the very beginning step by step.

Natural beekeeping is a very interesting and informative read as well. The information on this topic (and all books for that matter) is changing fairly rapidly as more and more studies and tests are done, but this book will bring you up to date on natural beekeeping techniques.

There is a presentation in the spring 2009 in Niagara Falls NY and I believe the main speaker is someone who is doing natural beekeeping--I'll post more info on this when I get it. The problem with the treated hives, among many things, is that the mites grow resistant to the treatment. The argument is also that the bees can't very well develop their own mite resistant genetics if we keep stepping in with treatments. If you're involved in beekeeping even a little you'll be familiar with this argument that goes round and round.

I try to stay open so I can hear from all sides. One thing this has shown me is that beekeeper's are certainly passionate about the topic of bees.

Munro Honey in Alvinston, Ontario

If you like white wine or light tasting drinks then you must try Mead. I had never had it before although I had heard of it spoken of as a popular drink from the Middle Ages.

Mead is made with honey and water and yeast that is then fermented.

History tells us mead is probably the oldest alcoholic drink known to mankind and there are many mentions of it in the historic writings.

See a brief history of mead on Wikepedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mead#History).

It is believed that the word 'honeymoon' came from the tradition to supply a newly married couple with enough mead for a month, ensuring happiness and fertility for a full cycle of the moon, hence the creation of the word honeymoon.

Munro Honey in Alvinston makes an award winning mead and if you've never tried mead, I suggest trying their blue label "Mead" or my personal favourite, the green label "Sweet Mead".

Munro Honey http://www.munrohoney.com/ is a large scale commercial beekeeping operation.

Last summer I drove out to Alvinston, Ontario to pick up my supplies and had a brief tour of their brand new facility--sorry I didn't have a camera with me at the time. I was really impressed with all the large stainless steel vats for the mead making.

In the store they offered samples of the wine (no they didn't card me to make sure I was old enough to drink alcohol--those days are long since past). Of course they sell honey (raw, creamed, flavoured--just about all the ways you can package it) and they have a really quaint gift shop with bee and honey related items.

I found some great primary books there on bees - Honey in the Hive (http://www.amazon.ca/Honey-Hive-Anne-F-Rockwell/dp/0060285672/ref=cm_cr-mr-img).

Munro Honey run around 2,000 hives and they supply many of the grocery stores in the surrounding cities with honey and honey comb.

My nephew Codie, had never tried honeycomb before so I made sure to buy some for him to try. He's addicted now and every time he comes over he looks through the kitchen until he finds it.

I bought my original hive boxes and supplies from Munro Honey last year and now that I've decided to give up procrastinating on finishing preparing my hives, I placed an order for my wax covered plastic foundation.

I'm moving forward, and here's the box of supplies just delivered.

The off-white sheets are wax coated plastic (permadent) which will slide into the frames for my honey supers.

The honey super is the box that goes on top and it's just for honey only.

This is where the extra honey will go and it's for the beekeeper's use. Beekeeper's only takes the extra honey from the bees that they don't need.

Both plastic foundations have a light coating of wax on them which smells great. It will encourage the bees to use this pre-molded foundation to build their honeycomb.

The surface of each sheet is pre-pressed with a honeycomb pattern which the bees will use as a guide when making their comb.

The larger black permadent is for the medium sized deeps where the bees will live and raise their brood. The medium deep is the box that sits on the bottom (that is if you're picturing the traditional beehive with two boxes, one on top of the other). Bees will store some honey and pollen on these black frames for their own personal use as well as using most of the cells to raise their brood.

Bees have special wax producing glands on their abdomen. These glands will secrete the liquid wax into little pockets on the bee's underside. The wax then cools and turns white.

The bees then remove these little scales of wax with their feet, chew it into a soft mash with their mandibles and shape it into perfect honeycombs... easy eh!!

(I can't even DRAW honeycomb accurately let alone make it yet this insect does it with no schooling, no drafting paper, rulers or anything!!!)

This new permadent foundation is black. I haven't seen black before in all my web reading. I think I may have seen a couple photos of frames with black foundation. I expect the advantage with black is that you can more easily see the tiny little white eggs at the bottom of the cells. That makes sense since white plastic has been used for years and when the combs are new the white really shows through making the white eggs very hard to see.

I'm thinking I might keep a couple of my honey frames with no foundation and put in a vertical dowel so that I can have honeycomb to eat.

When the plastic foundation is used, the honeycomb built on it is left intact to be reused by the bees to fill up with honey again. The foundation makes the combs stronger and more stable for handling.

To create honey comb, the bees are usually just given an outside frame that they can build comb inside. The honey and wax from honeycomb is delicious and even the wax can be eaten.

Each evening throughout March I'm determined to move forward by preparing for my bees in spring.

I have my hammer, wood glue and nails in the living room and I'm all set. So while it's snowing or raining in the evenings, I'll flip on the TV and work on nailing my frames together.

Ten frames go in the medium deep on the bottom and usually the honey super box on top has about 9 frames.

A healthy hive of bees can produce as much as 100 lbs of honey in a season. They also make the honey comb so when the beekeeper slices off the wax caps to release the honey, that wax is saved. It can be used to make all kinds of products from candles to furniture polish. Nothing gets wasted.

The more I think about bees and how special and important they are the more I can't wait to start.

I just got to keep thinking positive.

I'm Scared to Keep Bees

I confess I'm scared. I'm scared to keep bees.

Here I am in February (2009) and I caught myself procrastinating on finalizing my plans to start keeping honey bees this spring.

I have two hive boxes that I bought last year and I've put them together and painted them.

I have two hats and veils and a pair of coveralls. I have a couple hive tools and a bee brush.

But I haven't ordered my foundation yet and I haven't put my frames together. That was supposed to be my winter project. And winter is nearly over. At least according to the groundhog Willie from Wiarton who saw his shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter. For a procrastinator, that's not a lot of time until spring.

So, I'm delaying my plans. I don't even have a place to keep my hives yet. I should be calling farmers or neighbours and friends that have large lots of land to make arrangements for a place to put these hives. Instead, I'm keeping to myself.

I asked myself why? And the answer worried me.
I'm afraid.

What I'm not afraid of is the bees themselves or bee stings--that's really the last of my worries. You might think that would be what would make me hold off and procrastinate, but no, that's not it.

Neither did the T-shirt I saw at the annual beekeepers' convention in Niagara Falls throw me off. It said on the back, "I'm a beekeeper. If you see me running, you should run too." I just laugh every time I think of that t-shirt.

But I'm still scared. What am I afraid of?

I realized that I'm afraid of failure. I'm afraid the bees won't make it. And if they don't make it, then I'll have to deal with all the reasons why and my own feelings of failure to help them be successful. And there's lots of reasons these days why bees may not make it. My success is absolutely not a guaranteed thing.

I remind myself of my purpose in beekeeping so that I could learn about the bees, hopefully help them and if all goes really well, I'd have some honey and wax. I remind myself that pass or fail, the saying "this too shall pass" applies. Over time, the bees will succeed--or not. Their genetics will change over time--or not--and those that are fittest will hopefully survive to carry on. I don't particularly like nature's policy on this and am wont to interfere.

In the mean time, I'll face this fear as best I can--head on. I'll use what I call the elephant approach. Ask yourself, what's the easiest way to eat an elephant? They're pretty big after all. The answer - one bite at a time.

And I'll remind myself that I'm most definately not in this alone. There's a sea of beekeepers at the meetings each month and they are generously eager to share their wisdom.

I will perservere. Succeed or fail, the bees and I are in this together.

My First Bee Sting

In September, my father went raspberry picking.

Dad regularly travels out to the Lakeside/Embro, Ontario area to work on his large vegetable garden.

He had discovered a family owned Pick-Your-Own Raspberries and vegetable stand a concession over from where he was working.

Of course he didn't hesitate to set aside some time to drop in for an afternoon of berry picking.

He came home with some whopping big berries in his baskets which he was very eager to show me.

It had been a good season for the berries, enough water and sunshine.

And the last few days had been really hot and sunny.

This was why Dad came over to see me to show off his berries and to tell me his news.

It was honey bees. Lots and lots of honey bees!

Thousands of them he said, and they were all swarming happily over the raspberries.

He offered to go back the next day so we could both pick berries. Of course I wanted to go so I could photograph these bees.

But it wasn't that simple, we had to go to the farm and work in his veggie garden. So he managed to swing an afternoon of labour out of me. That was kind of clever I thought.

Then after a few hours doing that we would drop in at the raspberry place and get our berries.

The sun did not disappoint and it was another great day for bees. Not much wind and tons of sunshine.

As soon as we pulled in you could see the little dots racing back and forth over the rows of raspberries.

I got my camera out.

We took 8 quart baskets with a tape-like rope threaded through them.

We tied the rope around our waist so the basket would hang there in front, leaving our hands free for the picking.

Dad, being a complete workaholic raced to his assigned row and began picking with gusto.

Me, I wanted to enjoy the place and take my time, and visit with the bees, observe, take photos and pick some berries.

Within 5 minutes Dad had almost two pints picked. I had 5 berries in my basket (and I didn't eat any). Now I was working and not just lallygagging around. I soon figured out the problem while I watched Dad finding these super big clumps of berries where he was able to fill his pint with one clump--my row had already been picked over and so it was much more sparse. He was making me look bad!

I did my best to fill my baskets and get as many closeups as I could. We chatted with the owner when we paid our bill inside his store. I told him of my interest in bees and about the research I'd been doing for my book about bees. He showed me some tiny round holes (about 1/4") that were drilled in the edge of the facing board on his storefront porch.

The holes were drilled by Carpenter Bees. He said he could watch them coming and going and he could often see little drifts of sawdust where they had tunneled into the wood. I was glad to see that he enjoyed the study of these bees and wasn't irritated that they were drilling small holes in his wood.

The owner answered my question about where all these bees were coming from.

There were 25 beehives at the back of his property.

He said the hives belonged to a man named Bryanson, an old white-haired gentleman.

He said I was to feel free to go on back down the lane and see these hives.

So we did.

I was unprepared to visit hives that day so I did not have a veil or hat with me.

At the back of the property by the edge of the trees were about 12 hives lined up along a circular track.

I took my camera and got out of the car.

Dad waited inside the car.

Bees were everywhere.

The air was just filled with them.

There was a continual communal buzz, a happy buzz and you could tell these bees were pretty busy going about their labours collecting nectar and pollen for their stores.

I walked slowly toward the first hive and the first thing I noticed was the strong smell of honey. Wow! The last time I had been that close to hives was in very early spring on the bee course. The bees hadn't had time yet to produce any honey.

Also, the air was cool so the honey would be chilled. But that day, standing in the bee yard, the smell of honey was very strong.

It was difficult to tell where the entrances to the hives were. I walked over to some other hives and I was trying to watch to see where the bees were coming and going from.

I noticed one hive in particular that appeared to have no activity and I wondered if the hive was dead. I was bending closer to have a look when I heard the loud buzz in my ear.

I stepped back a bit and then I felt the buzz and brush of a bee near the corner of my mouth.

What followed then was a sting. It was a slight pin prick really and nowhere near as painful as any stings I'd experienced before from hornets and yellow jackets. When the bee pulled away I felt the plop vibration--I knew that would be the back end of the bee's body being torn away with the stinger. But at the time I was moving quickly to ensure no stinger was left behind.

I heard another loud buzz by my ear and I figured that it was time to get the heck out of there.

It's sad how we say "stung by a bee". We say it from habit, but for most of us 99% of the time it was never the docile honey bee that was guilty.

Usually the stinging insect is a hornet or wasp.

There was a small amount of swelling and the pain travelled a little out from the area but it was by no means disabling.

I knew from my research that the main thing is to make sure no stinger is left behind in your skin. If the stinger was still there, then if the venom sac was still attached it would continue to pump venom. This would result in more swelling and pain. There's lots of debate whether to scrape or pull the stinger out, saying that pinching the sac would cause more venom to be pumped in. The key thing everyone agrees on is get the stinger out as quickly as possible. Often the stinger may not even remain in the flesh, which was what happened in my case.

So, I have been initiated with my first real bee sting--I'm sure it won't be my last!!!

Ferguson's Apiary in Hensall Ontario

Last summer (2008), the Elgin, Middlesex and Oxford Bee Association had a meeting at Bill Ferguson's apiary in Hensall Ontario(http://www.fergusonapiaries.on.ca/).

The weather cooperated beautifully and we spent part of the day touring a few of his 700 hives.

Bill breeds and sells Buckfast queens and he showed us his queen rearing operation.

His wife works in the small shack in the bee yard where she selects bee larvae to place inside the little starter cups that will be placed inside his nucs.

I watched while she used a pen-like instrument with a goose feather tip to gently lift a clump of royal jelly with a bee larvae into the little cups.

She commented that if she touches the larvae at all by accident then they don't use it.

These starter cups (this is a term I made up because at the moment I can't recall what they should be called) will be created into supercedure cells by the bees inside the nucs.

The peanut shaped large supercells are larger than a cell for a regular worker bee--that's to make room for the queen's bigger abdomonen.

As you can see from the photos, Bill creates these really cute "mini nucs" that he uses to raise his queens.

The gals in our group (myself included) thought these little Barbie doll size hive boxes were very sweet, especially with the pink and purple paint.

For comb, they make small frames to fit the hive boxes.

They use a small piece of wax comb as a starter strip for the bees to build their comb on.

Inside the mini nuc Bill puts a Styrofoam cup with sugar water for the bees as a built in feeder.

I enjoy the interesting colours that beehives were painted with. A beekeeper confessed to me that the colours are usually whatever paint is on sale at the paint store.

The honey house was a real commercial operation with equipment for large beekeeping operations complete with a warm room to help keep that honey flowing.

Although we brought veils and hats, no one wore them--and they weren't needed.

It was a hot and sunny day and the bees were happy to be flying about their business gathering pollen and nectar.

Outside one of the hives was a large mass of bees, some of them in a ball shape.

There was some speculation as to what exactly was going on, whether they were actually balling the queen or whether they were outside the hive because they'd been irritated by a predator such as a skunk.

It was a very interesting day and I enjoyed an opportunity to see a larger beekeeping operation.