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  • From: Marty Hanks <marty AT justbeenc.com>
  • To: Phil DeGuzman <phil.deguzman AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: "ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org" <ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [ocba] Splits and Supers
  • Date: Mon, 18 May 2015 21:40:46 -0400

Phil

I always do summer splits.  A great way to break the varroa brood cycle and increase my hive count going into winter.  I do pick from the largest Like yours or most hygienic. Just more bees to rebuild stores or if done early enough draw comb. Come July the comb making usually stops. Even with feeders on. 

But again these are bees...anything is possible! 😉 

I've done both top and bottom suppering. In 5 years and 30+ hives I still do not have enough personal data to say which is best. I use to do the same bottom suppering in the beginning to try and stop swarming -(insert chuckle here) but now I'm just trying to find the best "queen excluder" trick. 

I do blind splits and just wait 12 days to inspect. Both hives gets a health powder sugar dose to drop exposed mites.  Any longer and you run risk of damaging queen cells on the one.

Good luck!
Marty

Sent from my iPhone

On May 18, 2015, at 9:14 PM, Phil DeGuzman <phil.deguzman AT gmail.com> wrote:

Earlier this year (in Mid March) I made a split from a very healthy hive. The split seems to have "taken" and both hives are now humming along. I was in my hive this past weekend and have a couple questions/discussion topics that  I'd like to hear your opinions/experiences on:

Summer splits: no, not banana splits, but splitting a healthy beehive in summertime (as opposed to spring). I have read a few articles (I suspect written by folks from up north) who suggest that a split made in the summer months (June) are sometimes more successful than earlier splits. I am curious about this because I just added two more mediums on one of my hives (it has two deeps for brood box, plus there were two medium honey supers with about eight frames each nearly full of stores so I added a couple supers to give them elbow room (and to prevent swarming). with four mediums on top of two deeps the stack is getting taller than I am comfortable working...hence my question about splitting the hive in summer; I would consider a second split to prevent adding even more supers should the two I just added get full.

Now my second topic: bottom supering. One of my hives had two mediums pretty full of honey and I am nervous about swarming. So I added two super in a technique I have seen referred to as "bottom supering". So basically I took the two full mediums off the hive bodies, put two mediums of drawn comb on top of the hive bodies, then put the ful supers back on top. My rationale was that I wanted the workers to pass through the empty drawn comb so they would be more likely to use those empty frames. In the past, I have had issues in previous hives where if I added the new supers on top of full supers, the top supers just didn't get used as much as I expected and the hive swarmed.

Please share any thoughts, experiences, opinions or links to relevant articles. I have surfed a lot of different materials, but as I suggested above, much of the material is written by folks in other parts of the country.


--
"There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all." ― Peter F. Drucker
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