Mid WINTER SPLIT required to prevent swarming. See all the drones at entrance? http://www.mahakobees.com/blog. At a glance we could see hyperactivity at one of the hive entrances. It is middle of winter in Australia, but the bees don’t mind. There is still plenty of flowering trees and plants around, and the temperatures range from 5C (41F) at night to 26C (79F) in the day. In the sun, it can easily get to 35C (97F), so the honey bees are very active. Yes, the queen slows her laying, yes the drones are mostly evicted (see our DRONE EVICTION video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWSBfbAixo0&list=TLv0QzyBZoGSnAy635ZPGocQaJdtWePfqP), and there is no honey flow, but none the less, if the hive is doing well, they can swarm and we certainly need to add honey supers at least once. In fact, several hives have 4 full honey supers on top of a single brood box with a queen excluder.
Clearly, this is not your typical winter activity for most beekeepers around the world, and we are very lucky to be located here in Australia, because we rarely worry about preparing bees for overwintering, we never need to feed our bees any sugar water or pollen patties, and as you can see, we can even encounter the odd swarming situation and need to split the hive or manage the colony to prevent it.
In this short clip, we ended up removing plenty of the drone comb and splitting the hive into a small nuc. A video on how that went mid winter and how the new hive progressed with making a queen and establishing themselves as a strong hive will be released soon. It’s on the cutting table now. So we invite you to subscribe and click the thumbs to show support. We release new videos weekly so join us if you like bees, are a beekeeping enthusiast, or just like to learn what all the buzz is about.
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