On Sat, 29 Nov 2008 14:02:37 -0500, Steve Noble <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Have either of you written articles about this procedure in one of
> the bee mags?  Is it more strictly a commercial operation?  Advantages?
> Timing? Etc?  Is there any reason for a hobbyist to do this?

 We always called it "breaking up"; trashing sounds sort of abusive,
when in fact it is highly beneficial. I wrote about this in the ABJ in
2007:

What I have in mind is an annual system that anyone can use and it
does not involve killing off the bees. We lose enough colonies as it
is, so we must have in place a system to have new ones coming along.

It's best to have hives in several stages in order to not lean too
much on one particular plan. By this I mean: making splits in the
spring and also making splits in late summer. Colonies started in the
early spring build up fast, don't swarm, and should make honey that
summer or fall. In order to get spring honey, or do early pollination,
one depend on the colonies the previous summer. The exact dates are
going to depend on your location and the nature of your honey flows.
Many operators go south, make splits during the winter and haul them
north.

What makes this an annual plan is not the killing off the colonies at
the end of the year, but rather this: the hives are broken up while
still in their prime. My favorite method of making splits is to haul
the entire apiary to a new spot several miles away and immediately (or
the next day) break the hives up into as many new ones as you can get.
A few frames of brood and bees will do in early spring. Each hive is
divided up into an obvious group (or mark the group with a crayon),
all nucs in that group coming from the same original hive. In three
days, you can return and put queens into any hive that has no fresh
eggs. This greatly simplifies finding the old queens: they will be in
the nucs having fresh eggs and should be easy to find in the small
units. These older queens should be replaced as well.

Another key point to this system is: you may not get as much honey out
of each colony as you used to. But remember, it is not the average
that matters, it's the total. It really doesn't matter if you get a
ton from ten hives or thirty. The old method of having really strong
hives producing two or three hundred pound averages brings with it a
whole host of problems. Second and third year colonies are more apt to
swarm, have to be watched closely for storage space, and develop high
levels of mites. A first year colony isn't going to swarm and the
whole yard can be supered about the same, since they are all about the
same strength, requiring less individual attention.

The complete article is archived at:

Keeping Bees Without Chemicals, Part One
groups.google.com/group/upstate-new-york-beekeeping

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