👑 Getting Split Ready

We are big fans of the OTS (mdasplitter.com) method of rearing queens and splitting a hive. We typically do it in the Spring to help keep swarming down and in Mid-Summer to help knock the mites back and produce fresh queens for next year's Spring build-up. The reason we like it so much is its ease, lack of specialized equipment, and it doesn't require a ton of bee resources. We are a small operation with goals of maintaining six hives: 4 for honey production and 2 support hives for unforeseen, but inevitable situations. So grafting a slew of cells, starter/finisher hives, and mating nucs are not appealing. Plus the lack of fine motor skills put a serious kabash on transferring larvae to a cup. The head beekeeper is not feeling it either, she wants to make honey not bees, so the process just works well for us.

We wrote up an OTS Schedule and a process that's in a Google Doc (Gee's Bees OTS Procedure), but some highlights:

• Ease
• It doesn't get much easier than removing the queen from an existing colony and notching underneath appropriately aged larvae.
  
  
• No Specialized Equipment
• This is a bit of a lie. We have tuned our process to make use of a split board or Snelgrove Board. This helps us with space going up instead of out, keeping our hive footprint to six. It should be noted that you don't have to do this, and splitting the queen into her own box has its advantages.
  
  
  
  
• No Heavy Bee Resources
• You are just using the colony itself and not making an additional starter hive brimming with bees. By condensing a double brood hive down to a single you obtain the same result. Plenty of nurse bees, crowded space, and a queenless situation.

The secret to this will be making big colonies ready to split early to mid March. This way we can have things back to some resemblance of normal by the time the flow starts, mid April'ish. Always a struggle and definitely a balancing act. A regular old fish or cut bait or in this case split or make honey.