Many years ago -- 1975, I guess -- I helped a beekeeper from the Imperial Valley
of California make up his summer losses. During the long, hot (up to 120 F) summer
was when most of the hives failed. In the winter, he would truck them over to the
coast where the hives could build up in the avocado groves on mustard, ceanothus,
and other early bloomers. In fact, when this beekeeper was a kid and worked with
his father, they used to camp in tents on the beach -- made a vacation out of it.

Anyway, he would set the hives out in rows, as California beekeepers like to do,
leaving space in between the rows for another set of rows. After the hives had set for
a few weeks, truckloads of dead hives would be brought in and the "dead-outs"
would be set in rows behind the live ones. Then we would smoke the live hives at the
entrance, driving most of the bees into the second story. This would be placed on
top of an empty single story hive and an empty second story would be placed on the
live hive.

He had several other ways of dividing hives, but this was the fastest and easiest one I
ever saw saw. You could divide hundreds of hives per day this way. Of course, they
had to raise their own queens, but very often the hives already had queen cells under
way and sometimes we would cut these out and give them to the weaker ones so
that they would benefit from a nice fat queen cell.

Reminiscence by
Peter Borst
Ithaca NY
USA