Too Many Bees? So We Split Our Hives 🐝

How do you know when it's time to split a beehive? We thought giving our yellow hive four supers would be enough to prevent it from swarming... but we've since learned that splitting it earlier might have been the better decision. Both of our strongest colonies—the Yellow Hive and the Red Hive—have been growing incredibly fast this spring, and we finally decided it was time to split them. In this video, we show how we split two of our hives and explain why we chose the frames we did. As mentioned, our Yellow Hive had already grown to four supers. While giving the bees more space certainly helped, we now think splitting the colony earlier might have been the better choice. It may even have allowed the bees to focus on capping more honey instead of continuing to expand. In this video you'll see: 🐝 How we split our hives 🪵 Which frames we moved—and why 🍯 Why we decided to split the colonies 🌼 What we learned from the experience This is our very first season as beekeepers, and every inspection teaches us something new. This was one of those lessons we're glad to have learned before it was too late. 💬 What makes you decide it's time to split a colony? We'd love to learn from your experience, so let us know in the comments! Thanks for watching, and we'll see you in the next hive inspection. 🐝 #beekeeping #beehivesplit #honeybees #swarm #apiary