May I have your attention, please? The following is not the real Jeff Fox review. If you create more splits than a divorce lawyer, you might be a beekeeper. If you dream of your life ending the same way as a drone bees, Welcome, welcome to Be Love Beekeeping presented by our good friends at Man Lake. Today, our guest is Frank LaCotta, and we'll be talking all about splitting your colonies. When to do it, why, and even how to do it. If you're a new beekeeper, this is vital
information. And if you're a seasoned pro, you still may learn something from Frank's years of experience. But first, some honeybee fun facts. Did you know? that honeybees have a sense of smell 50 times more powerful than a dog? Did you know that honeybees can taste with their feet? Wait a minute, I'm not so sure about this one. But what I'm reading here says the claws on a honeybee's foot are especially attuned to salt. Did you know that honeybees like caffeine?
Studies have shown that caffeine consumption actually improves honeybee's memory and learning capabilities. And finally, did you know that a queen bee's stinger is smooth, unlike a worker bee's which is barbed? This allows her to sting multiple times and survive. I'd always been told that queens don't sting and it's true, they rarely sting people. They primarily use their stingers to defend themselves or to be aggressive against
other queen bees, especially rival queens. And that's why their stingers are designed to sting multiple times without it killing them. Before we jump into it, I'd like to give a quick shout out to V2B Health for their support of this podcast. Vita's Varroa Control range of products includes Apistan, Apigard, and now Veroxan Extended Release Oxalic Acid Strips. Thanks guys. Now, let's have a chat with Frank. I'd like to welcome to the show today, Frank LaCotta, coming to us all the
way from, are you in Pennsylvania? Yes, I'm in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Well, it looks like you're in a beautiful cabin. I'm just trying to picture the snow, the mountains, that kind of stuff. But it's springtime. Right. That's long gone. And today we're talking about a spring subject, which is splits. Everybody's heard about this. Some people are experts at this. Some people are new to beekeeping that are listening and
have no idea what we're talking about. So, Frank, being the expert that you are and you were with Man Lake for years, weren't you? I was with Man Lake for about just over 10 years. It was actually the twilight of my career. I was working on Wall Street, pretty much a financial district most of my career. That's an adjustment. Yes. Wow. Congratulations. Thanks. I want to start with the first part of what's going on with splits.
And the first question that I have for those that don't know, why do we want to do a split? And when is a good time? Okay, the reason why we want to do a split is bees have this natural instinct to propagate themselves. One way of doing that, they have a few ways, but one way is by swarming, where that's where 60 % of the bees in the old queen actually leave the hive. That's where you see them hanging on that post
or that bush or that house or whatever. the foragers or the scouts go out and find a new location. That is something that happens almost with every overwintered hive. So I tell most beekeepers, if you have an overwintered hive is almost for sure going to swarm on you in the springtime. The ramifications of that are you lose your queen. You may or may not get a new queen based on if she, the new queens are raising fly out and they may make it back. Okay. but it sets your hive
back, of course. So you may or may not get any spring honey. You might get a little bit. You might get none because it takes him a while to build up again. So as a beekeeper, we want to take control of that. Rather than let those bees swarm, we do what we call a split, which we do it right. The bees believe they swarmed and we can control those splits to the point where we
do not lose our bees. Better for us. to lose the bee or to keep the bees with that split than to lose them in a tree or, you know, wherever. And frankly, it can be better for the bees, too, because a lot of swarms that leave don't live. Absolutely true. If they can't find a place to make that new home or they don't have time to build up, depending what time of year they leave.
Yes, those swarms just may not make it. So for us and as good beekeepers, It behooves us to do these splits because we can replace our winter losses, our dead outs with these splits. We can grow our apiary if that's what we choose to do, or you may just make a nuke out of that split and sell it off and make some money back. We know that beekeeping is not cheap. So there are a lot of reasons that we want to do that. Yeah, it's good all the way around. All right, let's
talk about wind. I mean, you and I are in colder climates, but Some people in the US, and we have listeners all over the world, if you're in an even warmer climate, you may be past the best time to split already. If you're in a cold climate, it's coming right up. Well, I'll agree with you somewhat on that. We might be too late. We may not, because there's another time of year when we can make splits. But we'll get to that. But
spring splits, you're right. We want to get into our bees when the weather is warm enough for us to go in there and start checking brood, right? That's what we're going to take survey of what's going on in that hive. And we're going to look for a few things. The main thing is congestion in that colony. Congestion is not how many bees are in there. It's when that queen starts running out of space to lay eggs because they're bringing
in a lot of wet nectar. You'll see in that brood nest, it's filled with wet nectar and a lot of brood. Once they get that, that can trigger the swarm instinct. So as beekeepers, we're going to go in there, we're going to monitor that, right? And we're going to see how much cap brood they have in there, that brood nest is growing, how many bees are in there, how much room is in the brood area for those bees. And that's when we're going to determine when we want to
make those splits. We don't typically want to wait till the bees start thinking, hey, I'm going to swarm and start making swarm cells. We want to do it before that. For instance, in my area, usually about the 15th of April, I know I have to go in there and start checking brood, right? Because the bees need a few things, obviously. They need some brood going before they're going to swarm. They also need drones. They will not swarm without drones. They need drones, obviously,
for those virgin queens they're making. So we look at those drones. When we start seeing drones in that colony and a lot of brood, a lot of bees, congestion, then we know it's time to maybe make that split before the bees do it. So why don't we wait to see swarm cells before we do that? Well, the problem with that is if you wait too long and they have capped swarm cells, you can come in and make that split no matter what, or you cut those swarm cells out, which is what
a lot of people do. If there's one capped swarm cell in there, the bees are going to swarm anyway on you. And now you've got what we call a hopelessly queenless condition, which is something very common to new beekeepers. They don't realize that they think cutting out all those swarm cells will stop them. It won't in a lot of cases. So it's better for us to be proactive and make that split. We can always rejoin that split with the mother call me later if we want. All right. So
we've talked about timing. I know a lot of beekeepers go online and they look at videos and they see all kinds of different sorts of splitting techniques that there are out there. I know you have a favorite. Will you tell us before you jump into your favorite? Just name some of the others that you know of. What options do we have? Well, there's walk away splits. There are the split that I do where I know where the queen is. The walk away is one where you don't know which box the queen is in.
let the bees make their own. You basically just split the hive in half, right? Right. Or you can, you know, there are other ways where you actually just pull enough brood and nurse bees off to make a nuke and replace the comb you pulled with drawn comb, not foundation, into the mother colony and, and let the bees, you know, continue on. You just pull that nuke off. You may add a queen to it. You may just have a young one day old larva in there where let the bees make
their own in that nuke. There are a lot of ways to do it. If you get a hive that you're too late and it's got all kinds of queen cells in there, cap queen cells, you can pull out a couple of frames, three frames and put it in a new box. Another three, put it in another, you could split that colony up into three, four or five nukes and then wait a month, see which ones made queens. If they didn't, you could rejoin the ones that
didn't, but the ones that did. So there are a lot of options and making nukes and splits is much easier than the average beekeeper thinks. Really really easy and I love your simple method and I think you called it the easy split or something like that Also a shakedown split. Yeah Something I forget what it there's all kinds of names for it. You can trademark it make t -shirts if you want. Yeah Well, I didn't invent it. I've seen
it. I saw it somewhere else as well when I was much younger I just call it the the shake split because the simplest way to describe it is we've got it in this case, say two deeps and the bees, we've got a lot of bees. We've got a lot of brood. They are absolutely thinking, you know, getting to the point where they're going to think about swarming. Where's my queen? I don't want to pull every single frame looking for my queen. What I'll do typically is I'll balance those boxes.
So I'm going to, maybe the day before I'm going to make that split, I'm going to go through there and I'm going to make sure that I have some very, very young larva in the top box, mostly open. brood, but I want a couple of very young ones. And I'm going to have a couple of frames of cat brood in there as well. The reason why I want the young larva in there is because that's where the nurse bees are going to go to and take care of. So I prep my boxes the day ahead. I wait
a day and I come back. By prepping, you mean you're actually moving frames around so that your top box looks like this thing that you're explaining. Correct. I want to put the majority of the majority of my cat brood in the bottom box. and the majority of my open brood in the top box. And I'm going to come back the next day and I'm going to have an extra empty box
sitting on the ground next to me. I'm going to pull every frame out of the top box, shake those bees off of it, look it over just to make sure that queen's not on there, put it in that box on the ground. I'll do that with every frame until that top box is empty. All my frames are in the box in the ground. They contain nothing but honey and all kinds of brood, whether it be eggs, larva, cat brood. That's it. Maybe, you know, the occasional bee is still on there,
but the queen certainly isn't. I'm going to take the top box on that hive, shake it, whatever bees are on the inside of that box, shake them all down. Take that box off. Now I've got a single bee and a lot of bees in there. I have my smoker going. If I lightly smoke those bees, they're all going to go down into that bottom box. I'm going to put a queen excluder on top of there and take that box from the ground with all the brood, put it back on top of that colony and
close it up. And I'm going to leave it overnight. What's going to happen is with all that open brood up top, all the nurse bees are going to go up to that box. And that's what I want for that split, those nurse bees. And I know my queen is down in the bottom box. She's under the queen excluder. So I'm going to come back the next day. I'm going to have my hive stand ready to
go. my bottom board, my lids, I'm going to take that box off, I'm going to move it over to the new location, and the mother colony that I took that box from, I'm going to remove the queen excluder and put another deep on top of that box. So now the bees have room to expand up into there. The swarm instinct or pressure has been taken off that mother colony and now I've got a second colony. Let me just take a minute here
to thank our presenting sponsor, Man Lake. One of the things I love about Man Lake is their commitment to education because that commitment shows how much they want you to be successful at beekeeping. One great resource is their mobile app. You know, it's not just for shopping. It's packed full of all kinds of helpful information, including videos, articles, plus a plant identification feature designed to help beekeepers identify and plant bee healthy plants for their area.
It's free, so download the Man Lake app today. And speaking of shopping, don't forget your discount code MLBlove10. It's in the show notes. For $10 off your first $100 dollar purchase. Now, back to the guest. most of the day and put that in near the end of the day into that new split and let them get used to that queen and let her out, you know, five, six days later. Now I've got two functioning colonies with laying queens.
If I let the bees raise the queen, it's fine, but it's going to take another 30 days before she's back in laying. And if there's any issues with her not making it back to the colony, well, then I've got to start again or I could rejoin that with the original hive. So I tend to buy queens myself in the springtime. Is it true that split that you've just talked about making that you're going to put someplace else, does it really need to be two to three miles away? No, we're
moving mostly nurse bees across. So the nurse bees have never left the colony. As long as there's a queen in there, they'll stay. Any foragers you moved in with that colony, they'll fly out.
They'll come back to the mother colony. What I tend to do to ensure that a lot of bees stay in there and they don't drift out I will close that hive up for a couple of days I'll put that queen in there and then I'll stuff the entrance of my hive with grass I'll pull grass and stuff the entrance closed, you know, it's usually the springtime. It's cool enough They're not gonna
overheat in there. I've got a feeder on there so they're able to get syrup and After two three days that grass naturally will wilt on its own and the bees will start coming and going By then, they've established that this is their hive. They won't drift back to the mother colony. If you didn't put a new queen in that box, then are you in the same situation or are you going to start losing nurse bees or are they going to be patient for a month? I would do the same
thing. I would close it up with grass, but I would absolutely make sure I've got syrup in there and at least a few frames if I'm going to let them raise a queen. I want a few frames with a lot of pollen in there because To raise a queen, they've got to make royal jelly. Royal jelly comes from a gland in those bees, in the nurse bee's head. But to make royal jelly, they must consume bee bread. Bee bread is a mixture
of pollen and nectar. So I'm going to make sure they have plenty of both, if I'm going to let them raise a queen. And after, they'll start raising a queen almost immediately. Within a few hours, they know they're queen -less, they'll start raising a queen. So after a day or so, when that grass starts swelting, they're not going anywhere. They're staying in that colony. I have a lot of success doing that. I rarely lose colonies when I do that. And they don't
need to be two to three miles apart. No, because most people, let's be honest, I happen to have 12 or 13 different locations, but the average hobby beekeeper does not. They have one place, one apiary. So no, all you have to do is close it up. Close the hive up for a few days. I'm glad to hear that. You mentioned another time of year that's also good for doing splits. Let's talk about that. All right. So we all know we could do a spring split and people do it a lot.
But the other time we could do it that I do it is when the nectar flow is in full, you know, raging, which in my area is June. They're bringing in a lot of nectar. I've got a lot of bees in that colony. And I go back to this is when I make my my nukes to overwinter. I overwinter a lot of nukes. So to do that, I got thinking about it one time and I thought, well, my nectar flows over the first week of July. It takes from
egg to emerging bee is 21 days. Once that bee emerges, it's another 21 days before it becomes a forager. So any larva or egg that's laid in the first to second week of June, By the time that becomes a forager, my flow is over. So what I will do is I'll go into those colonies about the second week of June, and I'll pull off almost all the open brood. I'll take it with the nurse bees on there, and I'll make a lot of five -frame nucs. And I may take, out of every hive, I could
make maybe two, maybe one and a half. And you can combine frames from multiple colonies into one nuc box. It doesn't matter. And I'm going to shake a lot of bees in there, a lot of bees into those nucs. Anything that's a forager is going to fly out and come back to the mother colony. So what I end up with is I end up with my mother colony has almost no open brood in it. So all the nectar they're bringing in is
going up to honey production. And my nucs, you know, they've got open brood and I'm feeding them. And what I've done, which I don't want to buy queens this time of year, I can let the bees raise their own, but what I tend to do is I graft a lot of queens. So I usually, by using the calendar and planning out my work, I have
ripe queen cells ready when I do this. So I just come through, I wait half a day after I got these nukes all set up, and I go through and I drop in ripe queen cells that are gonna hatch in a day or two. And that's how I do it. You know, I might make 100 of them, and out of those 100, Maybe 60 to 70 of them are successful in a month. They have a laying queen. The other ones, I just combine them back with another hive. It doesn't
matter. So what I've done is I've taken the pressure off the mother colony to feed all these bees, moved it to a nuke. So my mother colony is doing nothing but putting up honey. And these nukes are raising queens or, you know, and they're starting to lay. You know, she'll go out there, she'll mate, she'll lay. And those nukes, by the time I get into fall, they're going to be a double nuke, a 5 over 5 nuke. And I can take
those through the wintertime. So it's almost like an insurance policy for me, in that if I lose a lot of bees in the wintertime, I've got all these nukes. So if I go into winter, instead of going in with my normal 200 colonies, if I go in with 200 colonies and 100 nukes or 50 nukes, no matter what I lose, I've still got enough bees to have my 200 colonies come spring, because we all lose bees in the wintertime. We know that.
You make this all sound really simple it actually is And I appreciate it, but I know it can't be that simple It is are there things that I need to look out for mistakes that maybe I should avoid well Yeah, I mean I would say the most common mistake I see people do is when they make a nuke They don't shake enough bees into that nuke because they get no they get a lot of foragers in there that happen to be on the frame when
they pull it and those foragers fly back. You need enough bees to keep that nuke, the brood warm in there. So you should, you know, obviously it's much better if you either find your queen so you don't shake her into that nuke box. So you want to find her. Once you've got her frame, I'll go through that colony and I'll find that frame. I'll have an empty nuke box on the side and put just that frame in it with that queen so I know where she is. Now I could shake a lot
of bees into that nuke I just made. The foragers fly back. That's fine. The nurse bees stay there. When I'm all done, I take that queen frame and put her back in. I know she's in the mother colony, and I know she's not in any of the nukes I made. So that would probably be the biggest mistake people make is they do not put enough bees in that box. And they should, being that they're weak, feed them syrup, feed them sugar water. Don't give them, you give them a frame of honey.
Bees don't raise brood off of honey. They raise brood off of nectar. They make wax off of nectar. So... It's really quite simple. When I was much younger, I thought it was this big complicated thing and my mentor showed me and I was like, wow, that's all there is to it. And from then on, I've never been out of these. And by the way, you've got a good YouTube video on this and I don't very often recommend YouTube videos because there's a lot of bad ones as well as
the good ones out there. If people want to actually see how you do this very simple split is it just under Frank locata or is it under man Lake? It's under man Lake And my I don't believe on these I think it shows two boxes one might be purple on the ground, you know two different high bodies that's the start of it says making a split or something and Yeah, it shows it easy and I tend in my in my YouTube videos. I tend to not put a lot of Fluff around everything I get right
to the point. I don't want people to be bored I'm just gonna do it quick and hopefully they see how easy it is I just pulled up the video. It is a purple box on the bottom and a yellow one on top Yeah, there you go. So if you find that you've got the right one. That's right. It's under the man Lake Channel Okay Love it
anything else we need to know about splits. I swear you've made it simpler than anyone I've ever heard before it is very easy and you know All I think is people need to, you know, don't just watch me. Watch 10 other people on there as well on YouTube. Read a few things and take the best of everything and put it together. That's what I did my whole career is I wouldn't just listen to one person because we all do things differently. I'd watch people, I'd listen to
people and I would try different things. I would make one split this way, one another way and see which one worked out. The only way you learn to be keeping is to make a lot of mistakes. You don't learn by being successful. You learn by making mistakes your first five, 10 years, then you become successful. So do you mean at this point, I'm not going to make any more mistakes because I've passed 10 years now? No, because I've been in it over 20 years and I still make
mistakes. So we never stop. Oh, there's so much to learn. And that's part of what I love about it. There is. Yep. And then things change all the time. You know, things I used to do. Even 10 years ago, I don't do anymore. I do something different. So keep learning. Yeah, I love the intuitiveness of it. As you were talking about, look at 10 different videos and then use your own intuition. Try to be in tune with your bees to know enough, right? What's going to work best
for them, right? What I do in Pennsylvania may not work in Texas and vice versa. So you've also got to take your location into account and yeah. I always tell people, try everything. That's why it's always good to have a couple of nukes to play with. Because if these are your, what I call production bees, or your only two colonies, you're not going to experiment at all. But if you have your two colonies and you got a couple of nukes on the side, play with them. That's
how you learn. Sounds great. Okay. It's time for you to give us a wild and crazy story. Have you thought of one yet? Well, yeah, we all like to... have videos of us standing there with no protective gear on going in our colonies, you know, and we know that, okay, this time of year, the bees are - Don't do it. No, don't do it. I, you know, I was like that at one time and my, my experience was, so I needed a frame with
some eggs on it. So I stopped it in a beer and I thought, I'm not lighting my smoker and I'm not going to wear my gear. I'm just going to pop the lid real quick and just ease out a frame. So I went to the hive. and pulled one out. The bees were calm, pulled one out. There's no eggs on there. Put it back in, pulled the next one. There was none there. And the bees are starting to come up through the frames. Pulled the third one out, none in there. And just as I'm putting
it back, they just came at me in droves. I was running through, it was a big garden, my neighbor's farm. I was running through that field swatting and running and screaming. I think I got lit up about 40 times that afternoon, but yeah. So, my takeaway from that was never assume that you can go in there without gear. I always have my jacket on now and ready to pull it up if they turn on me. Such great advice. Frank Licata, thanks so much. I really appreciate your time
today. Sure, Eric. Thank you very much. Thanks again for joining us here on Be Love, Be Keeping presented by Man Lake. Hey, if you wouldn't mind, please take just a couple of seconds here to follow or subscribe to this show and to share it with a good friend. I got thinking. Have you ever wondered how much you actually love your bees? Tell you what, ask yourself this philosophical question for the day. Would I keep bees even
if they didn't provide me with honey? Ponder on that and we will see you next week.