A Practice Swarm??? Might be Time for a Split!!! 🤔5/21/2026

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:14]Hey, this is Keith at Half-Track N Honey Bees. Hope you're doing well today.

[00:00:19]Well, it's kind of clouding up.

[00:00:23]Like we might actually have some rain.

[00:00:26]That'd be kind of nice. We're supposed to have showers for the next week or so. And if you add all the totals together, it says about 3 in of rain. But, uh we shall see. That would uh That would be nice if it all just come real slow. It will all go in the ground.

[00:00:41]So, uh that would be a good thing.

[00:00:44]But, what we're going to look at today, I've got a hive down here that when I got out early this morning, they were already swarming at about 8:30, 9:00.

[00:00:55]Now, when I saw them, they were actually going back to the hive. So, it was a uh Some folks call it a practice swarm. Uh Maybe the queen didn't come out with them. Uh she might have been sleeping in and didn't get the memo that they were going to do it today.

[00:01:09]But, uh who knows?

[00:01:11]Anyway, the bees didn't end up in a tree.

[00:01:16]They just went back home.

[00:01:18]But, that obviously tells me there's something going on in that hive that I need to uh deal with.

[00:01:23]So, that's what we're going to do today.

[00:01:26]You can see here that uh quite a few of them are still outside the hive.

[00:01:31]It was a lot more earlier.

[00:01:34]It's interesting they're in uh two separate little groups now.

[00:01:39]Makes me kind of wonder if there's a uh couple of virgin queens there.

[00:01:44]But, uh I don't know. I'm going to treat it like a swarm. I'm going to spray them down with uh sugar syrup. And uh we're going to see if there's any queens in there. And then we're going to open that box up and uh see if we've got queen cells or what's going on and we might end up doing a split or two. So uh that uh that hive has actually made quite a bit of honey for me this year.

[00:02:04]So I'm uh I'm proud of them, but uh now they decided to go a little uh wacko on me, but uh I guess swarming's natural, nothing wacko about it. So uh let's see what's going on.

[00:03:02]Okay.

[00:03:04]So this is the hive that swarmed and came home.

[00:03:09]So the first thing I'm going to do is kind of look around and see if I see any sign of a queen.

[00:03:31]They're not balled up or anything.

[00:03:35]There's no lumps like they're protecting a queen.

[00:03:41]So I'm going to spray them down with some sugar syrup.

[00:04:02]>> And I'm going to put them in this little nuc box.

[00:04:10]Until I feed them again.

[00:04:14]What I'm actually going to do But I'm just going to take a license plate and scrape them off into a box.

[00:04:26]Not going to hurt the bees.

[00:04:32]And then I'm going to dump them into this little nuc right here. And I've got the uh entrance reducer turned so they can't get out.

[00:04:59]Okay.

[00:05:02]And dump those in here.

[00:05:08]Get this little clump down here.

[00:05:25]Now, I've got an inner cover for this nuc that's got the center with a piece of screen on it.

[00:05:44]Okay.

[00:05:55]>> So those bees are out of the way now.

[00:06:00]So we can get in the hive and see what's going on.

[00:06:05]That worked pretty slick. Didn't even need the license plate.

[00:06:09]I like that hive. This hive has made several supers of honey for me this season.

[00:06:13]But now I believe something's changed in here.

[00:06:21]Let's see if we can tell what happened.

[00:06:28]Plenty in that box.

[00:06:32]Okay, the excluder went with it. That's fine.

[00:06:40]Let's just take a peek right quick.

[00:06:44]And see if we got any swarm cells.

[00:06:54]Lots of practice cells.

[00:06:58]But no swarm cells.

[00:07:05]A lot of weight in that box.

[00:07:08]You know, we've had trouble this year with the the bees putting lots of nectar in the brood area.

[00:07:17]Not leaving much room for the queen.

[00:07:21]That might be what we've what's happened here.

[00:07:38]There's a few here, but it looks like they've hatched.

[00:07:45]I did rip it, but there's not anything in them.

[00:08:29]That's the supercedure cells here.

[00:08:52]You got plenty of bees.

[00:08:56]Not seeing any brood.

[00:09:02]Another supercedure cell.

[00:09:16]A lot of food.

[00:09:33]It's a little toasty out here today.

[00:09:37]About 90°.

[00:09:39]In the But don't worry about the bees in that box over there. It's got a screen bottom in it.

[00:10:01]And with that screen top, they're getting plenty of air.

[00:10:13]Wow.

[00:10:22]Lots of cells in this box.

[00:10:36]But no brood.

[00:10:46]Huh.

[00:10:53]Need to think about this one for a minute.

[00:10:58]I got that little split that I did the other day at the end of one of my videos.

[00:11:12]But I could put in that box, shake a bunch of bees in it, look for the queen as I'm shaking.

[00:11:29]There's still some cells in here.

[00:11:33]And there's some hatch, so there might already be a virgin queen running around or she might be out mating or she's come back. Who knows?

[00:11:45]I think I'm going to do that.

[00:11:47]Let me go get this little hive over here.

[00:11:57]It's nice having the tractor here to work off of.

[00:12:03]So, let's swing this around.

[00:12:07]So, in this hive I had two frames of capped brood and one frame of really young larva and eggs.

[00:12:15]This was going to be a little split.

[00:12:17]But now I'm going to put this nuc into this box.

[00:12:22]I'm going to shake a bunch of bees and get the population down. We'll put the bees out of this box in there.

[00:12:27]Might need to add a second box, but we'll see when we get there.

[00:12:31]And uh we'll go from there.

[00:12:44]But this one really just has nurse bees in it.

[00:12:56]So, they won't go too crazy.

[00:13:10]Put that down in the bottom.

[00:13:14]So, yeah, we've got nice frame of brood.

[00:13:25]This was some brood and food.

[00:13:33]This one had a lot of really young larva.

[00:13:40]Now we did it like day before yesterday.

[00:13:51]Okay.

[00:14:00]There's another brood comb on each side.

[00:14:18]Okay.

[00:14:20]Now I'm going to go get another medium box.

[00:14:29]Now I'm just going to put it on there for right now.

[00:14:33]The original box over here was four brood boxes high because it was a really strong hive. Obviously too strong. I'm going to take it down to three so we'll have enough frames to fill up that top box. But I'm going to shake the bees in first before I put that top box on there.

[00:14:52]Okay.

[00:14:57]Let's get them out of this one.

[00:15:04]But I'm going to look real close for any kind of queen I see running around.

[00:15:13]Cuz they're very calm.

[00:15:19]To be queenless.

[00:15:26]Then, of course, our foragers will fly back.

[00:15:29]I'm going to put two frames in this little box for now.

[00:15:34]But, the nurse bees will stay over there.

[00:15:42]Frames that have any kind of supercedure cell, I'm going to leave over here.

[00:15:47]Just in case they need it.

[00:16:59]Another good food frame.

[00:17:05]Oops, sorry about that.

[00:17:16]This is a honey frame. I'm just going to get out of here.

[00:17:19]They got too much food.

[00:17:50]It's a good drawn frame.

[00:18:04]It's a honey frame.

[00:18:26]It's a good frame with some drone comb.

[00:19:13]We got a lot of bees up here.

[00:19:17]Transfer bees or house bees, whatever you want to call them.

[00:19:21]But we know the queen ain't up here, so we can do some shaking without whole lot of shaking.

[00:19:28]Cuz they're above the excluder.

[00:19:48]Just moving population.

[00:20:03]All right.

[00:20:09]So, do we know exactly what's going on in this hive?

[00:20:13]No.

[00:20:15]We don't.

[00:20:17]We know there's a bunch of open queen cells.

[00:20:21]And we know there's no brood right now.

[00:20:25]So, I'll check back in about a week and there should be a change.

[00:20:31]If there's not a change and we have brood or we don't have brood, then we'll have to do something different.

[00:20:52]Get this box out of the sun.

[00:20:56]Now, we do need to put the bees in this box over in this box.

[00:21:04]But let's Let's make a hole through that.

[00:21:26]That was easy.

[00:21:48]Well, I'll just leave them bolted together.

[00:21:51]But, we're going to see if we can pour them in.

[00:22:27]I'll put this old inner tube on here.

[00:22:35]Now, I'm going to put some alfalfa hay on here.

[00:22:43]Because it's going to be cloudy and rainy the next few days.

[00:22:51]So, they could use a little snack.

[00:23:12]>> Yes, this is getting my gloves gooped up.

[00:23:14]But, I'll wash them.

[00:23:18]Pretty easy to wash gloves. Just soapy water in the sink. Let them dry.

[00:23:23]It's good to put them on before they dry all the way and get the fingers stretched out.

[00:23:28]If you don't do that, they're a little hard and crunchy first time you put them on.

[00:23:36]Okay.

[00:23:38]There we go.

[00:23:46]Now, we can just put them back over there where they were.

[00:23:50]Yeah, I like that idea.

[00:24:01]Okay, we'll go turn this around so you can see where we're going.

[00:24:09]Pretty heavy little box.

[00:24:25]Okay.

[00:24:38]If you've seen my videos before, you know I like to put a little something in front of the hive to block the entrance just a little.

[00:24:54]So, that will force them to reorient when they come out.

[00:25:01]Okay.

[00:25:02]I believe that'll work.

[00:25:04]That hive I'm not too worried about.

[00:25:06]They'll make a queen.

[00:25:07]The old hive, I don't know.

[00:25:11]We'll know soon enough.

[00:25:13]Well, that was fun, wasn't it?

[00:25:16]Gosh, it came a little shower and now it's muggy. Very muggy. What would they say on uh the Road Runner Coyote show? Muggiest Maximus?

[00:25:24]Yeah, that's where we learned all our Latin, that wasn't it?

[00:25:27]Anyway, so we had that one hive, did a practice swarm, uh came back and landed on the outside of the hive.

[00:25:38]We scooped those up, put them in a box.

[00:25:40]Uh we made a split.

[00:25:42]Um used a uh little nuc that I'd already made a split in. Feel pretty good about that one. Now they're uh they went from a nuc box to a couple of mediums. Got a lot more bees in it now. Got uh a lot more frames of food. So uh they'll be fine. Uh the original hive, I'm more worried about that one. I didn't find any brood in it. A bunch of uh queen cells were open, uh nothing in them. Uh several supersedure cells were still there, unopened, but uh let's give them a week or two and uh see what they can do.

[00:26:15]Uh the little hive, we just need to leave it leave it alone like a split for 30 days and see what happens. So uh stay tuned. We'll uh we'll revisit most of them here before long.

[00:26:27]So, got some thunder. We need some rain. Not this the shower.

[00:26:34]If you enjoyed that, please hit the like button. Subscribe to my channel if you like my variety of crazy stuff.

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[00:26:57]We will see you later. Take care.