in a world brimming with complexity few creatures embody harmony like the honeybee with tireless precision she dances from bloom to bloom each motion guided by millennia upon millennia of instinct each act in service to the whole and then There are the beekeepers, watchful stewards
of this ancient symbiosis. Part agriscientist, part poet, they move along their hives with the efficiency of mow, levy and curly, tending to the bees' needs as best they can comprehend, and with the infrequency of a waterfall in the Sahara, sometimes running off flapping and flailing like a penguin on a hot sidewalk. This is their journey. Welcome, welcome to Be Love Be Keeping
presented by Man Lake. By the way, if you haven't yet, please subscribe to and follow the show, tell your friends about it, and click on over to BeLoveBekeeping .com to sign up for our free newsletter. Today is gonna be a whole lot of fun. Our guest is a commercial beekeeper who's going to talk with us all about splitting hives and his two favorite methods for doing that. He also has a great wild and crazy beekeeping
story. But first there have been some crazy things in the news recently and I wanted to share just one of them. Have you ever heard of a beekeeper going to jail for how they were keeping bees? Hey, I've been following this story for the last three years and it's finally come to a conclusion. Here's the headline. Beekeeper jailed after unleashing swarm during eviction. So here's what happened. Law enforcement was trying to serve eviction papers on the owner of a 1 .9 million dollar
home in Massachusetts. when a beekeeper arrived with a truckload of beehives and began opening them in the driveway. I know, sounds pretty awesome. Ah, but not so quick. Deputies on the scene quickly realized what was happening. Quote, hey, hey, hey, she has a truck full of bees, one deputy said, according to video, prompting another to respond. What the? In a court affidavit, it turns out the beekeeper said that she intended to let the bees forage on the lovely flowering landscape.
Well, maybe protesting the eviction at the same time. But as deputies attempted to intervene, hives were knocked over, releasing hundreds, thousands of bees that repeatedly stung officers and sheriff staff. One person was even hospitalized. Others suffered stings to the face and head. Prosecutors said the bees were effectively used as a weapon. A jury agreed, convicting the woman of multiple misdemeanor counts, including assault and reckless conduct, while acquitting her of
some more serious felony charges. She was sentenced to six months in county jail, though her lawyer said she had already spent months in custody and would likely serve only a short remaining term. The sheriff said this is unlike anything our team has ever experienced. The woman's lawyer said, She had been trying to stop the eviction of a friend undergoing cancer treatment, describing her actions as driven by concern over quote, the humiliation and devastation of going through
an eviction. During the confrontation, deputies ultimately tackled and arrested her as bees swarmed the property. officials said the incident endangered both law enforcement and nearby residents noting that thousands of bees had also died during the chaos. All right we're not here to condone or condemn what happened but you should know this your bees can be considered a weapon and you are responsible for them so be smart and be responsible.
I'd like to welcome to the show today Seth Homer who's coming to us from Utah and Good morning, Seth. How are you? Good morning. I'm doing wonderful. Thank you Have you ever been on one of these
crazy podcasts before? You know, this is a first so I'm a little little nervous, you know, but a little excited same time so I'll tell you something that will help your nerves and that is you know ten times more about beekeeping than the host here does so Well, I don't know about that there's things you probably know that I don't know as
well. So we're just here to have a good chat and you guys do some really great social media and email and stuff and had recently posted some step -by -step things about splitting hives and it's that time of the year. We're recording here at the very end of April 2026. This will be coming out probably mid -May and so I thought You know, this is a topic we ought to just really jump into and take as deep a dive as we can. So you're going to be on the spot for a bunch of that,
Seth. Before we do, I'd love to hear a little bit about your family business and how you became a part of it. Where did beekeeping start with? Because I don't think you're multi -generational, you know, like 100 year beekeepers. No, we're not. It all started with my dad. I want to say 13 years ago or so. My dad was just a hobbyist.
He just wanted to get into bees. He was in a gardening class and kind of overheard a conversation about bees and so it kind of piqued his interest and he realized that he had some lack of... the buzz, you know, the sound in his cherry tree. And so that kind of piqued his radars, you know, the antennas turned off. And anyway, so he got a hive and he kind of just kind of just learned like everybody else. Back then, you know, YouTube
was just starting. And so there was a lot of information, a lot of people he was watching knew just about as much as he did. There were a few beekeepers like David Burns who kind of was his little mentor, I guess, if you will. Anyway, so he just kind of grew from one hive and split the next year and grew. And every year he just split and grew a little bit more. Got to a point where he had bees in other people's backyards and he paid some rent of honey for
them to have them there. And so he kind of started selling honey at the farmer's markets and kind of made that a little business and got to a point where he sent some of his hives to California with a commercial operation. And he joined them. He went with them just to see how it all worked. And he kind of just caught the bug and thought, hey, man, this is something I could probably do. But for his age, he's like, if I was 20 years younger, I'd jump in and do this. But I'm not.
And so that's when he approached me with it. I honestly didn't really know a lot about bees. I didn't know about that world. It was totally new, but it was something interesting. And so I thought I'd give it a go. And so we went up and we spent a lot of time with this commercial operation just to kind of get my hands dirty and be in that environment and try to understand how things worked. So, and it was just super
fascinating. I just fell in love with it. And, and from there, I just, you know, I wanted to, I wanted to do that and be a part of that, whatever that was. And so, bought a couple hundred hives together. You know, we made our first splits and we, we, there's a lot of trials, lots of failures and obviously lots of, there's a big learning curve, especially starting with that many hives to get, to get going. But it was lots of fun and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
That's kind of how we started. My dad, he was really big on teaching and kind of sharing his, you know, he felt that there wasn't a lot of people around in the community that provided that education. And so he kind of started doing his own little education classes and from there he kind of just took off. So we've always had this. kind of this mission of just helping and educating others based off of our failures and
our successes. We want everybody to have that success and we know that our way is not the only way. We tell our beekeeping students all the time like what we're doing is not the only path. There's so many different ways to keep bees but there's a handful of fundamentals and principles that are the same. How you complete and how you attain those principles is up to you. And so probably give them some direction, some guidance. We've now grown, we're usually close to 950 colonies
by the peak of the summer. We've grown to that point, but we still have that same mission and we really love sharing what we know and to help somebody out. then awesome. It's actually been kind of a really cool because we have so many people that kind of come into your path as we were growing because of our challenges and the you know financially I mean we're scraping by. My dad's really good at he's a baby groomer and so wherever you can save money he's saving it.
Well that brings up a question that I had do you guys build all your own boxes or do you buy them? When we first started, we would buy them pre -cut and I would sit in my garage during the off season and I would just be up there, get my music going, pounding away, nailing and gluing the boxes and all the frames and my garage would just be stacked full of boxes and frames. And we would wait until we'd try to get orders from our customers and wait until the temperatures
were right. And once we hit above 50 degrees, we'd go out and stack our boxes up in the driveway, and we'd paint the tower of boxes. It felt like we're always a step behind. We're always playing catch up. The weather sometimes made it challenging. but at the same time, it made it a fun journey. Something to look back on, that was crazy that we were able to do all that, but we did it. Yeah, that's awesome. And it seems like, and just from my kind of outside perspective, some commercial
beekeepers, they've got like 10 ,000 hives. Okay, and so they're taking them out to pollination They're doing their splits or doing all that stuff and you guys are doing those things too But you also have a good online presence and you have a store and you're making things like soap I just bought some the other day and salves and all that kind of stuff and your sharing of knowledge you really do And that's one great thing about beekeepers in general, but you guys
really live it. I noticed on your website I'm looking at it on my other computer over here You've got a whole blog post about mite testing, and you've got a recipe for syrup, and for, what is this other thing? Honey Bee Health recipe, what's that? Honey Bee Healthy, it's a feeding stimulant. Makes the syrup a little more palatable for the bees, tracks them for spring buildup. So anyway you're sharing a lot of stuff and I appreciate it but I don't want to take any more
time on that. I want to jump right into splits. For those in the world that are in swarming season right now or are coming into it soon, let's talk about first swarm management because there are some people that are just saying I'm a hobbyist. I've got my half dozen hives. I'm maxed out. I don't want more. I don't want to do splits. But I also don't want to lose a ton of bees to swarming. So what advice do you have for people
in that situation first? Well, I think the first thing is they need to try to figure out what their goals are. Where do they want to be? And one of the things that we mention and teach Also in our classes is beekeeping is really expensive and it can be really an expensive hobby. And so there's a few different things that you can do to help support and sustain your little apiary. One of those things is you could sell your own
bees. So obviously when you get to a point, that point where you're just like, I'm done growing. I want to stay where I'm at. Then you got to start making some choices. There's multiple things you can do. Like I said, you can pull splits, you can sell them. There's ways to manage your bees to keep them intact as far as giving them space to grow and build up into their colony.
So you're not losing bees. That's a hard thing for me to take is people letting their bees just swarm because they don't know what to do and they don't know how to. how to manage that. I mean, they're freebies for somebody else, I guess, but it can cause problems for the neighbors. You know, we've had our own problems when we've, our first year anyway, we had to move on prematurely and we lost some swarms and we got into some neighboring homes and we had to deal with all
that. So it can be problematic, but there are things that you can do to mitigate those swarms and splitting them and Again, a hive is just under that state. When a hive gets congested, they want to swarm. And in general, it's a good thing. It's what bees do. You're not a bad beekeeper if your bees want to go swarm. Don't take it personally. They're not leaving you. They're doing what nature taught them to do, which is reproduce and make a whole other colony. And
yes, and it can be healthy for them. The brew break can be good for them and things like that. So, all right. Let's talk about, I mean, there's a lot of different ways to do splits. What's your favorite way? My favorite way, honestly, with what we're doing, I love, it's kind of a walk away split before we move our B's. And obviously this doesn't totally apply to all the hobbyists. But for me, I like the method where I actually
will take. take your top box or second brood box and I will put an empty box on the bottom and I'll go through and I'll take all those frames from that top brood box and I'll shake them down into the bottom box. I'll do that with the whole second brood box. I know the queen's in the bottom and I'll put a queen's scooter down and then I'll put that second brood box back onto the
hive. Now I can just go through, I know the queen's in the bottom, I can just go through and I can, the bees will come back up through the queen excluder, you know, populate that brood, second brood nest. And now I can just pull that box, move it to another spot. And usually when I'm doing this, we're actually doing it right before we move our bees to a new yard. And so that way they haven't oriented themselves to one location. So I can just set that hive down and I can just
move it right across from each other. I know I can just put a queen in and they're good to go. I admit a pet peeve of mine is that it seems all bee hives are white. Yeah, boring old white. And just when I get a pet peeve, Man Lake comes to the rescue with their new color collection. The vibrant new line of colorful beekeeping hive kits designed to turn your backyard into a buzzing work of art. Each kit comes completely assembled, ready to add to your bee yard, but with a big
splash of personality. We're talking dandelion yellow, garden green, coneflower blue, and even bold wild rose pink because who says a beehive has to be plain old boring white. Imagine stepping into your bee yard and seeing a rainbow of thriving hives, each one buzzing with life producing golden homegrown honey. And right now Manlike is offering podcast listeners 10 % off color collection hive kits. Visit manlikeltd .com and use the code SHOWMETHECOLOR at checkout. That's manlikeltd
.com Discount code, show me the color. For me, that's a quick way. You don't really have to think about it. You don't have to know about where the queen's at. Obviously, I like to divide up the resources as much as possible. Well, you said you know the queen is in the bottom box. So you've got to figure that part out at least. If I take everything and just shake them down to the bottom. Oh, OK. Every single bee, including
the queen, so you know she's in the bottom. Do you care if there's queen cells in the top or the bottom? Absolutely. Yeah, that's something usually I like to do this before we get to that point as much as possible. Obviously, you know, some eyes are a little bit quicker in their spring buildup. And so if I can catch them soon enough where they don't have queen cells, then that's ideal time. But regardless, I usually will crack
the hive open. look underneath you know smoke them so I can see if there's queen cells being built if there are then absolutely I'm going through every frame and making sure that I'm not splitting them with queen cells in the hive because if they get to that point that they have queen cells sometimes you can't stop them they're in motion of swarming regardless and sometimes you still can lose them and so you just got to be really thorough if you do see queen cells.
Unless you want them to raise a new queen, then that's an option too. And as a commercial beekeeper, you probably feel like you don't really have time for that. No. Because if they're raising their own queen, how long of a brood break is
there going to be? Well, the month that she's gone, at least a month, five weeks, you're not going to have any new... that brood's capped from her egg to to laying you know it's about 28 days and then you got another three weeks until her her new offspring her brood starts hatching out so you got a little while until
you got some new things coming in. And I've done some of those true walk away splits where I will take the queen and half the bees Move them someplace make sure that the other half that are left behind Whether you were talking about a top box and a bottom box, but whichever one that is that's left behind make sure it has queen cells and They're they're gonna make a queen and hopefully she gets mated properly Yeah, but you have to realize if you do that versus taking a queen,
buying a queen, however you get your queen, and put it in there and have them adopt her, you're losing six to eight weeks worth of creating honey and building up and doing everything that they do. So there's not a right way and a wrong way. There's different ways to do it, but realize what the consequences are and those aren't all negative. I don't mind it doing it that way because I'm not a commercial beekeeper. I'm not trying to make hundreds and hundreds of gallons of honey
every year. And so if I feel like doing it that way, I can. And if I'm in a different situation, it doesn't make sense. So how far away does someone need to move that split? You know, I usually say at least a mile if possible. I've heard people saying you got to move it three miles. I don't think that's not that big of a deal as far as moving it around that far. But if you move it around a mile, you're usually okay. You might want to close them off, keep them in the hive.
You can always put some obstruction in front of their hive. I mean, they're in a different environment anyway, so they should reorient. But with what we've done, a mile seems to work just fine. A lot of people don't have that luxury. And so I've asked that question of a lot of different people, and I get a lot of different answers. Personally, I've been okay doing it with a lot less distance than that, but I would move it further if I could. Yeah. Well, that's the distance.
I mean, you can split your hive and put it right next to each other. You can make that work. There's some things I like to rotate the hive a little bit so the entrance is facing a different way. The hive that you move over to the new spot, you got to make sure that you have plenty of
nurse bees in there. When you make your split, obviously all the foragers are going to fly back to the mother hive and so you got to have enough nurse bees that will stay put, take care of that brood so you don't get that off balance of bee population where one split might... kind of struggle or maybe be a lot slower because a lot of bees flew back so you definitely make a split and make that work without having to move them over
a mile for sure. So let's say you make your split you've done everything right you know where the queen is you've put a new queen over here and you've done made sure there's enough nurse bees everywhere and all that kind of stuff. Now, when should you go back and check on them and make sure that you've had success here? I like to make sure within a week's time, I like to go back just to see how their bee population is
doing. And you could probably go back even a little bit sooner and shake more bees over if you need to. I think a lot of that kind of sometimes depends on the weather. If it's cold, like right now, I mean, we've had this such a warm season and all of a sudden now we have got these cold spells coming in. And if you did a split before we hit our cold spell, well, I want to make sure that the brood is well taken care of and there's
enough population in there. And so I'd like to go in a little bit earlier, within a few days, probably just to see if a lot of the bees stayed put. But as far as making sure, see if they're successful, that all entails whether or not you're letting them raise a new queen. If you just put in a new queen, a caged queen, well, I want to get in there a little bit earlier, make sure the queen was released. I want to make sure she's laying within a week's time. So there's not that
loss of period. If something happens, and a lot of beekeepers tend to, like when you're doing something new like this, when you're doing a split or anything in your hive, it's important to get back. and make sure things work out sooner than later. It's really hard to recover from, for example, a bee package. When people introduce a bee package, you know, they tend to, sometimes they wait a little too long to go in and check to see if their queen got out or she's laying.
And then, you know, two weeks pass and nothing happened or something, your queen died or whatever it is. And you just lost all that time, that buildup. of, you know, in that hive. So same thing with the split. We want to make sure things are going right. If we're raising a queen, well then we need to make a little calendar of how much time it's going to take for that queen, you know, it's capped. And so I know from her being capped, I got eight days or so until she's
hatching. And then I know two weeks, you know, within 14, 16 days after that. she's laying eggs, and so you kind of have to keep track. I like to make sure you write things down. So if you do have questions, you can ask somebody, but you got to have some somewhere to fall back on and give them some information so you can make an educated guess on what's going on in the hive.
That keeping track, I admit I'm not very good at it, but I know how important it is because those things that you just described, of going from a capped queen cell to the timing of her hatching, getting mated, coming back and laying eggs. If you don't keep track of the day that you saw that, the day you made the split, the day you saw the cap cell, et cetera, it's pretty hard to know if your hive is on track or not. Yeah. Yeah. And so it could be too late and then
you run into a laying worker. Yeah. Yeah, are you able to tell by looking at a queen in this split hive? Let's say it was a true walkaway split and like we've been talking about they're raising their own queen Are you able to tell if that queen is a virgin or a mated queen? I usually can tell have a pretty good guess whether she's a virgin Mated queen. Yeah, I mean they they're definitely the size of the body the way that they move is totally different. Virgin Queen,
she kind of runs around with no purpose. She's a little faster and her body's a little smaller. Her abdomen has not grown and blown up. And so I can usually say I can tell between a Maided Queen and a Virgin Queen. So what does the Maided Queen look like and how does she move in contrast? Well, a maiden queen, obviously, she's going to be plump and her abdomen is going to be swollen. She moves around with more purpose. She's looking for somewhere to lay. The bees are actually attending
to her or a virgin queen. Again, she's just kind of running around. Or a maiden queen, they're going to be feeding her, grooming her. She's a little slower moving. Again, she has purpose at that time. So definitely there's a distinction there. Are you familiar with some of the other splitting techniques? Can you talk to any of them? Yeah, I mean we've done obviously pulling a nuke out, just making a small split. Can you
go through that in more detail? Sure. So when we're pulling splits off, just a little five frame nuke, I'm looking for When I do the split I want some food frames that usually are a couple food frames Give them some honey and some pollen or a mix of both I'm giving them two brood frames and obviously when you're doing your own split You can give them as many brood frames as you want at least I'd give them at least two two frames of brood preferably not have eggs So it's
older larvae or capped brood if you give them capped brood, the hive has to do less to take care of that brood. So there's less energy, there's less food consumption, they don't have to work as hard as a small little colony to take care of that brood. So I like to try to get capped brood if possible, or if not, older brood, open brood. So two frames of brood, and then I usually give them an empty frame. This is when we're making our nukes up for our customers. This is
what we like to do. And so I give them those frames and I'm pulling those bees out with them, making sure the queen's not there, making sure there's no queen cells unless you want to raise a queen. If you're wanting to raise a queen, I would suggest making sure the queen cell is almost capped. Again, it's less work for the bees to have to produce that royal jelly and make a good queen. So a strong hive can obviously make better queens. And I shake, get some nurse
bees, so frames of open brood. So I take those bees and I shake those extra bees into that nuc, into that split. So there's plenty of extra nurse bees in there. And then that's it. You either add a queen or you can let them finish off that nuc they're raising. That's kind of our method. And then when we're making our splits, we'll actually put them, place them in a yard where they can... fly and forge, and we actually let
our queens, our caged queens get out. We make sure that they're proven, that they're laying. So it takes a couple extra two to three weeks until they're actually prepped and ready before we hand them out to our customers. But aside from that, yeah, pulling it, making a split yourself, and that's kind of how we make those nukes. You make it all sound really easy. It's a lot of work. Nothing is as easy as it sounds like, and it's a lot of work. How many nukes are you guys
creating every year? Usually just a couple hundred. Enough to satisfy me. We could probably make a lot more, but we want to make sure that we got enough for any losses that we have or any growth that we want to make. It's kind of interesting that it's way easier to make bees than it is to keep them alive. And you can make bees all day long, pulling splits. Bees are really resilient and they can grow, I mean, just off a frame of brood and a handful of bees. You know, give them
a queen and they'll get going. And so you could do a lot with bees, but usually the trick is keeping them alive. That's where it's sometimes can be a little tricky. And we don't even have time to talk about Varroa and everything else today. We talk about that plenty here. Hey, last thing. And I'm sorry, I didn't warn you this ahead of time. But on this show, every guest has the opportunity to talk about a wild and
crazy beekeeping story that they've had. And that can be anything just super out of the ordinary or painful or embarrassing or anything kind of crazy that makes this so fun. Can you think of something? My first year into this. I kind of volunteered to do the, you know, manning the forklift and to unload our truck of bees. At the end of our first year, we were getting them back in the spring, that's what it was. And I was unloading the hives and we're doing it at
night. We're using the skid steer, so it's a little different than, you know, your standard forklifts that they had, but it's a little more bouncier. And as I was driving along and unloading, everything is so new and you're just trying to figure things out. And so, and when you're under pressure of trying to unload Bezo off of a truck, you know, your tents, your mouth, you know, I feel like I need to wear a mouth guard. And as I was driving around, the forks kind of tend
to get a little closer together. And I wasn't really paying attention to that. And I went to go lift him up. And at the time I was only, I was taking all three. three pallets that are too deep high off of the truck at the same time. Now you could do that if you have the right forklift and the, you know, the machine I was using, it was not good. I should have taken, you know, two off first and then one and it's a little more manageable that way. But I took all three
off and that's coming back. And because my forks were in and not spread out, it was a little topsy turvy. And so I pulled out and Silly me. I started just going and I just hit just this the bump just just enough where that thing just toppled over and I just felt so like so bad embarrassed Just I didn't know I mean I was just and then I I wasn't prepared for it I mean, I wish I had a suit at the time, but I just had a jacket and my jeans on and so but we had to get in there
and Take them all up. We're getting stung. We're just getting just hammered. That was kind of an eye -opening experience knowing what not to do the next time. You know, we went through all those hives and luckily enough we didn't kill any of those queens, which I was super surprised. But that was an eye -opening experience for me. I can tell you learned from it. That's the key. You learned. Hey, so if people want to find you, it's homershoneybee .com. Yeah, homershoneybee
.com. Hey, you can find us. We also have our Instagram, where we just started putting on our YouTube channel. And we're also doing a bunch of series, like we're doing more of this swarm series that's coming up. And so more videos to come. Obviously, like I said before, we love educating, we love making this content. To help whoever, it might help. All right. Appreciate you being with me today, Seth. Yeah, thanks for
having me on. Thanks, Eric. Thanks again for joining us on Be Love, Be Keeping presented by Manlike. Another big thank you goes to Vita B Health for their support. Vita's Varroa Control Ranger products includes Epistan, Epigard, and now Varroxan Extended Release Oxalic Acids Trips. Hey thanks a lot guys. And if you haven't yet, please subscribe to and follow the show, tell your friends about it, and click on over to BeLoveBeKeeping
.com to sign up for our free newsletter. If you have a guest suggestion, or topic you'd like discussed on the show shoot me an email eric at be love beekeeping .com and remember if you're not just in it for the honey or the money you're in it for the love see you next week