This is a picture of a sting
through my gloves. I have gotten several
stings through my gloves. My gloves are
made from lambskin and are very comfortable and easy to work my top bars, but
obviously that allows stings to go through.
This was during my splits. There
are several ways to split a hive. I am planning on doing what is called a walkway
split. That is where you take the queen
and move her into the new hives and allow the old hive to make a new
queen. My hives hold about 23 top bars and they were
full of bees to the point that they were overflowing. I was very afraid that they were going to
swarm. I have been trying to keep the
brood nest open and give the queen enough room to lay. Well, she has laid throughout the TBH. She has even laid drone in the honeycomb
area. The problem with TBH is that you cannot move up like you do in a
Langstroth. You could if you put a super
on top, but I didn’t want to do that yet.
My TBH are only about 38 inches long.
The new hives that we built are 46 inches long and hold about 30 top
bars. This will give me more room and
the queen more room to lay. When a queen has no more room to lay eggs, and
the hive is very populated, and she is laying drone, this is time to make sure
there is enough room in your hive otherwise it will swarm. This is why I needed to build the TBH. The splits didn’t go as smoothly as I
expected. The hives, although beautiful,
were not as wide as the hives that I got from Sam Comfort. I used Les Crowder’s TBH plans. Since my husband and neighbor didn’t know
exactly what I was planning on doing, they didn’t realize that the new hives
should have been the exact same width as the original. Therefore, when I went to move the first comb
it didn’t fit into the new hives. I had
to cut about an inch of comb off the bottom of each top bar that I transferred
to the new hives. This really wasn’t
what I wanted to do. I was unsure and
nervous about doing my first split to begin with. This just made it feel even more
difficult. Despite being stressed over
my mistake, the splits actually went very well.
I transferred 3 bars of brood and 2 bars of honey and pollen into each
split. Found the queen and transferred
her into each hive. I brushed several
bars of nurse bees into the new hives.
Now I just have to watch and wait and hope that the old hives will make
a new queen, and that old queens will do well in their new hives. Even after doing the splits I think I should
have split more, but considering the top bars didn’t fit I really didn’t want
to disrupt the bees any more than I already did. I think the only solution, is to build them
again. Oh the perils of a new beekeeper!!
