Hi everyone! Welcome back to Cody's Lab.
So.. this hive right here
is the one that I combined from two hives
to make one last Fall.
Now that it's Spring again,
I'm gonna re-separate them
so I can have two hives again.
So, let's get on it.
Looks like a bird nest landed
must've fell out of that tree.
Doesn't matter I can use that as smoker fuel.
Alright, so let's set up the second hive here.
(bees buzzing)
Stick some dirt under there.
That's good enough.
And here's the other hive.
Set this right there on those blocks.
Now we gotta put bees in.
(louder buzzing)
Now you can really hear the drones buzzing.
You see the larger bees down there are the drones.
Yup.
Let's set this over here...
(smoker puffing)
There's a lot of bees - let's make sure the queen's not on the lid...
...looks like we're good.
Gave 'em a little bit of smoke so they think a fire's coming and they need to gorge themselves on honey.
Alright, that did the trick.
Now my first task is to find the queen.
Because the last thing I want to do is put two queens together because they will fight to the death.
Okay I got a nice empty comb - let's put this over here in this other hive.
..after I check and make sure there's no queen on it.
(groan) These drones are going to make finding the queen a little harder
because now she's not the biggest bee in the box
but...
...I'm usually pretty good at this.
Let's see... are those queen cells built up?
Doesn't look like it.
Okay I found her. She's right there.
That wasn't too hard - she's a nice big queen.
So now I know where she's at, I can distribute these bees however I like.
I'm just doing a quick check down in this level of the hive
to see how much honeycomb they have versus
how much broodcomb they have.
This is the remnants of the paper that I put between the hives
so they would combine slowly and not fight each other.
You can see the bees chew that paper all to pieces.
Normally they pull it out but sometimes pieces get left behind.
Alright, so you know what?
It looks like this has got plenty of broodcomb and
a little bit of honey, some brood and everything so you know what?
Let's put the new queen in this box here.
So, as much as possible to simulate a swarm
I'm gonna move the original hive over
to the new location.
And that's where the new queen's gonna go.
The old queen is gonna stay right here.
And what's gonna happen is, a lot of the worker bees are gonna be flying around
and they're gonna back to this hive right here.
This way, the majority of the bees in here
will be the adult bees that are already able to fly.
Which should be the type of bees you'd have during a swarm.
Whereas the younger bees are gonna stay over here in the original box.
So now, I'm gonna add some more frames
just to fill up this empty space.
That one's broke.
Add this on top of there.
This way I'm starting out with a two-story high hive.
So here's the new queen.
So I'm gonna pop out the cork...
...and I'm gonna replace it with a candy plug.
This way she CAN get out but she's not gonna get out right away.
Basically this'll be just like the original hive swarmed
and they've created a new queen
via some queen cells.
But of course, I'm doing this before they started making queen cells so I'm doing it --
this way I'm controlling it
and they're not gonna wind up under a rock somewhere.
Alright, that should do it.
Just replace this other frame...
And there we are!
I have two hives again.
Hope you enjoyed, I'll see you next time.