180 - Glyn Stephens - Splitting your booming colonies

Speaker 1: From the Oregon State University Extension Service, this is Pollination, a podcast that tells the stories of researchers, land managers, and concerned citizens making bold strides to improve the health of pollinators. I'm your host, Dr. Adoni Melopoulos, assistant professor in pollinator health in the department of horticulture.

Speaker 2: OK, if your beekeeper spring has sprung, your colonies are growing here in Western Oregon, for example. We've had some pretty warm days with some bloom and the colonies have really expanded their brood nest. Now, for many of us, this is a point in the season to intervene before the colony swarm by splitting them in half and some in some ways kind of mimicking that natural process, giving half the colony a new queen and then making it just big enough so that it'll grow in time for the main honey flow, which here in Western Oregon is blackberries. I reached out to a few people who I trust dearly with my beekeeping life, namely Shelley Hoover, who we've had on past episodes.

And she said, if you want to talk about splitting, you should really reach out to Glenn Stevens. Now, Glenn has a beekeeping operation in Edmonton, Alberta, so up in northern Alberta, but he grew up in New Zealand helping his parents breed queens at their apiary. And now he's taking on this process of making queens in northern Canada. And so in this episode, he's going to tell us about what to do with those queens and similar things for us here in Oregon. Or if you're in Nebraska, you have the same problem. How do you take these big colonies, divide them into two, and make sure nothing goes wrong?

And how do you do it in a way that's efficient and quick? So this week on pollination, we're going to be diving into splitting colonies with Glenn Stevens. All right, welcome to pollination, Glenn. Well, thanks for having me, Anthony. Now, I'm glad to be here. We're way up north in Edmonton, Alberta, which is a thousand miles northeast of me here in Oregon.

Speaker 3: Yeah, pretty far north. We're, I think it's the northernmost city, above one million people or something like that. So I was fairly, fairly high up there.

Speaker 2: Well, the remarkable thing is that you raise and sell queens up there. And I guess the first question is, how is it possible to make queens in such a northern area in time for Alberta beekeepers to use these queens? That seems like quite a feat.

Speaker 3: Oh, it's, yeah, an excellent question. And the shorter answer is we actually can't. But we, well, we do make queens and we have queens available for about three months of the year. But the largest demand for queens, historically in Alberta has been April and May, where beekeepers want to make their early splits so they can divide their colonies early in the season and still make a good honey crop. So traditionally, and still today, a lot of the queens come in from the United States and well, California and Hawaii. But there is some research going on in Alberta on how to overwinter our queens so that we can have local queens that are ready and available in April.

But that research is ongoing. In the meantime, we're educating, trying to educate beekeepers on how we can use local queens a little bit later in the season to achieve their same goals. So we can be less reliant on the imported queens.

Speaker 2: Okay, so there's this big, we're going to be talking about splits today because here in Oregon, we're a little bit farther advanced than we're at that moment right now. But the idea when you're getting farther north is to produce queens and just kind of blend them into sort of renewing queens and making more colonies later in the year rather than right up front.

Speaker 3: That's exactly right. Yeah, so one thing that I really advocate for is making splits a year ahead. So instead of making your splits at this time of year to hit this year's honey flow, you'd make them in June or July for next year's honey flow. So you can overwinter those colonies and that way they're strong and ready to go for you in the spring.

Speaker 2: You know, I remember we had an episode way back with John Grushka, who used to be the provincial apiculturalist in Saskatchewan. And I remember that his philosophy is that you make up your losses the year before and then you're less reliant on packages. You don't have a gun pointed at your head in March.

Speaker 3: Exactly. And that's something that the Saskatchewan beekeepers are quite successful at actually. His legacy from him is that the Saskatchewan people are a lot less reliant on foreign packages and early splits than the Alberta beekeepers. But we also advocate for replacing your old queens after the honey flow in August. We noticed in our operation that older queens might make it through the winter, but then they'll kind of fizzle out at this time of year when queens are really hard to come by. But if your queen is young, she'll be much less of a chance that she'll peter out.

Especially like, I think we went from a brand with about a 15 percent spring queen loss to a 2 percent spring queen loss when we started replacing our queens late in the season.

Speaker 2: That's right. Because everybody. The difference everybody experiences is that you come into the spring and it's like, oh, my queen's dying. Yeah. Why is this? It's because she's worn out from the year before.

Speaker 3: Exactly. Yes. If she's brand new, then you'll see a lot less of that.

Speaker 2: OK, well, these are great. OK, so that's a really great discussion about how queens can be folded in at different times of the year. But we are at this time of year and a key use for queens traditionally has been to divide colonies. In broad strokes, what does this division, many people call it splitting, what does splitting involve?

Speaker 3: Well, if you have to sum it up into a sentence, it would be breaking up an existing colony into two or more functioning colonies. And that it can look like a lot of different things by the

Speaker 1: time you're done, depending on what goals you have for splitting.

Speaker 2: OK, so that's great. So you're kind of like you've got a colony and it's strong. You are just sort of making it. These are two kinds of like-going concern colonies at that point. And so you've used a queen. OK, all right, so let's go through all the pieces. What do you have to do before making a split and what is a splitable colony? Like what would you split and what wouldn't you split?

Speaker 3: Right. So the number one thing is you don't want to split a colony, which is suffering from some kind of disease. You definitely want the colony that you're splitting to be healthy because otherwise, you'll just have two diseased hives instead of one. And especially, especially brood diseases, a larger workforce can really help get that disease under control. Whereas if you have a colony that is suffering a little bit from, say, a European fell brood and you split that colony, it can really stress that colony out to the point where it might actually succumb to the disease. Whereas if you'd left it alone, it might have had the workforce to overcome it. Yeah, so that's the first consideration I would make. And you definitely want to make sure when you make your splits that they're going to achieve the goals that you're setting out to people don't usually don't just wake up in the morning and think, I'm going to split my hives today.

They normally have a reason they want to do it. So you, whether that's honey production for this year or honey production for next year, or whether it's just as simple as swarm control, or you want it to have a go at raising your own queens or something like that. You have to make sure that the hive that you're splitting from has the resources that you can make the split you want to make and still have functioning pieces left over.

Speaker 2: Oh, that's great. I think I started the question the other way around is like, you look at a colony, you know, what makes it, but you're flipping the question around is like, what do you want? If you're trying to make a honey crop, maybe it's best to leave that colony alone, or if you're trying to make up, like we talked about earlier, a replacement for next year, you might make, you might have, it might be splitable in that case, but that's a great way of putting it.

Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. So it's exactly. So you definitely want to make sure that your goals are going to be achieved. Otherwise, you're kind of wasting your time and you're potentially putting your bees at risk.

Speaker 2: Okay, so what's involved? What's the process of doing these splits and how do you kind of do it efficiently? You're not mucking about a lot.

Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's really easy to muck about. Trust me on that one. It's, yeah, you can spend a lot of time if you want to. So in any case, when you're making a split, you're going to be taking frames of brood, frames of feed, and frames covered in bees out of the parent colony, and then you're going to be putting them into a different box. Now, that box might be a small little box that we call a nuke box if you're doing a small split or it could be if it's a two, a double brood chamber colony, you might just split it in half into two single brood chamber colonies. But either way, you'll put the bees you want to take away from that colony into a different box and you'll take them away ideally. I moved my splits at least two miles away so the foragers don't return to the original hive.

Speaker 2: Oh, because then you would have, if you put them right next to each other, all the bees would just fly home and you'd have a depopulated colony. Exactly.

Speaker 3: Yeah, one of those colonies would get all the foragers and the other one would be stuck with no foragers and an uneven distribution of ages of bees and less workforce and things like that. So if you can't move them away two miles, then if you move both colonies, it can kind of help offset that. So if I can't move them two miles, I'll move each colony about two feet away from where they were. That way, when the foragers come back, they have to make a choice on which box to go to.

Speaker 2: Oh, right. I guess they can't tell anymore. I've actually done that before and a lot of people ask that question because they only have their home site.

Speaker 3: Yes, exactly. It's a very popular problem, especially in the hobbyist community where people are exactly, as you said, beekeeping in their backyard and they don't have another backyard two miles away to go to. So it's, yeah. So if you move them both a little bit it could be as simple as spinning them 180 degrees. So instead of the entrance facing east, it now faces west. The bees will come home and they'll have to choose which box to go to.

Speaker 2: Let's take up the situation of having a strong double brood chamber. You've got brood up in the top, brood down in the bottom, and you want to split that. I think that's for a lot of people, that's the most common situation. I think that's what we face here in Oregon. What do you do? How do you make that go quickly?

Speaker 3: All right. Well, the easiest way to do that depends on how many days you have on hand. Let's say you the absolute easiest way to do that is to open up your colony. And I make sure that there'd be an equal amount of brood in the top box and the bottom box and then an equal amount of feed. Same thing. So that essentially we have, if we took one of those boxes away, it would be okay on its own. Then I would put a queen excluded between the two boxes and I would come back three days later. And now without having to actually find the queen, I would know which box she is in because one of the boxes would have eggs and one of them would not. So then I could take away the box that had no eggs and then my split would be done. That's the easiest way to do it.

Speaker 2: So you're doing it kind of evening out in advance. That's right. Then you put the queen excluder so the queen has to stay in one spot and you can tell the which side she's in because one side will have eggs three days later and the other won't. And then you... Eggs would have hatched. Then you don't have to look for this queen.

Speaker 3: Yeah. That's the most time-consuming part of actually making a split. It's finding the queen and she can be very elusive. Even someone whose job it is to find queens all day can spend an hour looking for a queen in a single hive. So that's one way of doing it. It's the only disadvantage is that you have to wait three days after you've made your modifications and done your adjustments before you can actually make the split. So if you haven't got three days, you can do something similar where you make your rearrangements of the frames and then shake all of the bees off of the frames in one of the boxes and shake them all into the other box. Then put a queen excluder down, then put that box with the frames in it, but no bees on top of the queen excluder. Then all the bees will make their way through the queen excluder and the workers will. They'll fill that top box up to how it would normally be. And then you can take that box away knowing there's no queen. You have to wait. I usually wait overnight when I do that method.

Speaker 2: OK, that's a great system. And I remember a variation on that and making nukes. You know, people would sometimes thin out their brood chambers by taking into their first honey super. They take some brood frames and then take them away the next day.

And the same thing. They are just shaking. How do you for people who are real beginners out there? How do you shake bees off a frame? Like, how do you do that?

Speaker 3: Well, it's it's exactly as it sounds and it's kind of scary the first time you do it. But you you hold the frame in your hands. You I I put my fingers underneath the frame rest part of the frame and my thumbs on top. So I'm holding the frame. I guess kind of like a. Kind of like I'd hold a picture. I guess if I was holding it up to show someone. Oh, yeah, yeah. And then and en me. I just I give the frame a downward push and then a quick pull up.

And then with that motion, the the bees fall off the frame. It takes a couple of tries to get to get used to it. But once you've done it a few times, it's it's second nature and you are it's quite easy to do. And surprisingly, the bees are surprisingly tolerant of this behavior from us. They don't often get too aggressive when you do it. You'd think that you'd have a lot of angry bees on your hands from doing that. But they seem to be OK with it.

Speaker 2: So I imagine in a hive, everybody's tumbling all the time.

Speaker 3: I guess they must be because when I tumbled, they don't think.

Speaker 2: So OK, so let's say we're back at that situation. You're in Oregon, you've got a strong double or let's say you're even in Alberta. You've got a strong double and you do this division and you put the queen.

You shook off. You put the queen excluder three days, you have the queen list and you take it to another site. And how big should that division be in Alberta so that you can make a honey crop off it? Because you're clearly you're weakening the colony down, but it's going to catch up. There must be some kind of calculation in your head as to how big you need to make it so that you have the population to bring in a honey crop.

Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right. There is a there's definitely a sweet spot between making splits and still making honey from them. And here here in Alberta, based on when the canola normally starts, which is a heavy honey flow, I try to shoot for having four frames of brood around about the end of May. So if I'm making my splits at the end of May, I will make the splits up with four frames of brood. If I'm making them up earlier than that, I will kind of make my best guess as to how to make sure that I have around about four frames of brood at the end of May. So if it was early May, I might make it a three-frame, three-frame of brood split.

Speaker 2: OK, so if you had eight frames of brood in the colony, that's easy. And the timing works out about right. Because if I remember right from Alberta, canola is like the end of June that starts to come on or beginning of July.

Speaker 3: End of June and by the second week of July, it's in full bloom. So that's when you want the colony to really be ready.

Speaker 2: So it's pretty close here in Oregon. It's blackberries and it's coming around the same time. So that makes it that's a great calculus. So kind of for and then it will expand out and be able to meet your be a peak population and time for your honey flow.

Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And if I'm so that's if I want to make a make a split for honey production if I'm wanting to make a split for next year's honey production, which is something that we touched on a little earlier, I would make them up a little bit weaker than that so that my frames of brood would go a little further so I could make more of them with the same resources. And the reason I would make splits for the next year is so that I'm always going to have some winter losses.

And this way I'm anticipating them. And if I have when I have the losses, they won't be a big deal because I planned for them and I made extra splits to compensate. So I would probably make if I was making winter loss splits, I'd make them a little later, like probably in June or July. And if I was making them in June, I'd probably use two frames of brood. two or three frames of brood depending on which part of June I was making the splits.

Speaker 2: And then I guess your goal there is not to make honey but to have a big enough colony to winter in an Alberta winter. Exactly.

Speaker 3: Yeah. So if I made it that two or three frames in June, there would be too weak to take full advantage of the honey flow, though they would still bring in a bit of honey. But they would normally use that incoming nectar for wax building and things like that just getting them ready for feeding.

And by the time the honey flows over those bees are filling two boxes of two brew boxes and I can feed them like normal and they'll enter winter and hopefully, they'll be ready for me next spring.

Speaker 2: Okay. Let's take a quick break and then we'll come back. I've got questions. We've got this colony just sitting out there with no queen and I want to figure out how to put the queen.

I've got to do something about that. So let's take a quick break and not let that colony sit too long. Okay.

We're back. So one thing I just wanted to, we talked about those late splits to make up your colonies for the next year. And one thing you talked about was that that incoming nectar will be used to build wax and things.

And I guess I wonder about, you know when you're making splits, a lot of people are using it as an opportunity to retire old comb, and maybe can you incorporate foundation into making splits?

Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely. And I do regularly. And I do use splits exactly as he said as an opportunity to retire old comb. It's important to recycle that stuff. It sucks up a lot of bad stuff from the environment and eventually, it will negatively impact the colony, and the health of the colony if you have too much old comb in there. So with all of the splits that I make, I usually have one or two frames of foundation per box when I put a box on there. So with the exception of when I make a very weak split, like if it's in a nuker box, I'll give it all of drawn comb. Then by the time I put it into a single chamber, I'll put one or two frames of foundation in there. And then when it gets second for winter, again, it'll have one or two frames of foundation in there too.

Speaker 2: That's great. I guess you're kind of using that excess instead of just making a little bit of honey, you're kind of using it to draw out foundation and do this comb renewal.

Speaker 3: Yeah, that's exactly right. And it's kind of sort of double duty here in Alberta because the honey we get from canola is notorious for crystallizing very quickly. And bees can have a hard time metabolizing crystallized honey in the winter. They haven't got the readily available water they need. So it helps the bees kind of have less canola honey in their stores, which helps them winter a little bit.

Speaker 2: Okay, fantastic. All right, let's get back to that poor colony. It's been waiting for us.

Speaker 1: We moved it all the way out there with no queen. How do we... It's waiting for us. So it's like, come on guys, I know you want to talk about stuff, but we need you to help us out here. So I imagine it's the thing that people are most nervous about in this whole process is introducing the new queen.

Speaker 2: You spent, you know, 40 bucks on this queen and you're just like, oh, it's gone. So what is the trick to introducing a new queen to the queen was half?

Speaker 3: Well, there are a lot of tricks out there, but the most important one I would say is to leave that split queen for a while. And minimum I leave the splits is 24 hours before I put a new queen in.

But it depends on the strength. So if it's a weaker split, 24 hours, if it's a really strong split, like I've heard of some people here in Alberta making up splits in August with eight frames of brood and it's going on in a double box. So there's lots of bees in there. I would leave that colony for three days before I would put a queen in there. Just because there's so many bees and you're waiting for the old queen's pheromones to wear off before trying to introduce a new queen so that they're more receptive to the new queen.

Speaker 2: OK, so three days, no queen at all. It's not like they're corked in there. You're just you're three days, you're leaving them completely queenless before you even show up with the queen.

Speaker 3: That's right. Yeah. Gotcha. If it's if it's two boxes full of bees, if it's if it's less than if it's say a box and a half or a box out 24 to 48 hours is my norm. Yeah.

Speaker 2: OK, so you're going to get you're going to get a queen from a queen supplier and it's going to have a candy plug and a cork. Do you what do you do at that point when you come back three days or one day later?

Speaker 3: So normally I would take the cork out of the. So if it's a wooden cage, normally there will be a cork that you take out to expose the candy. I would expose the candy and I would put that cage, push it into a frame of brood, ideally emerging brood and push it in there and close the colony back up.

And I would leave it for at least five days before I checked on it. So I do it that way because I have so many hives and moys running around. I don't have time to do it the better way. Now, the better way is I would leave the cork in place and I would put that cage and stick it into a brood frame in the middle of the brood nest as before. And then I would come back about three days later and I would. I would investigate how the bees are acting towards the new queen.

With a little bit of experience and if you look at some YouTube videos, there are some really great examples out there. You can tell if the bees are ready to accept the new queen or not, based on the worker's behaviors. So if they really don't like that new queen, if she's still new to them, you'll see the bees quite frantically trying to break through the cage to get to her. They'll be trying to sting through the cage. They'll be if you brush the bees off the mesh of the cage, they'll be right back on it almost instantly. But if they're ready for her, it'll be calm. It'll be the bees will just be hanging out. It's like they're just hanging out at home and everything's good and there's ice tea on the patio.

It's everything's nice. You brush the bees off the cage and maybe one will slowly walk back on and say hi to the queen. But that'll be about as eventful as it will be. And in that case, you know that they're ready to accept her. You can take the cork out and release the queen. Now, a word of warning about that is often queens have been caged for over a week at this stage and sometimes they fly. So whenever I'm manually releasing a queen, I take the cork out. I cover that cork hole with my finger and then I put it inside the hive and then I put it near a frame faced with the hole facing towards the bottom of the hive. And then I take my finger off the cork hole and I wait. Sometimes it takes about a minute, but I wait for the queen to exit on her own and and then close the hive up. I've had too many queens that I care to remember to fly away on me because I took them.

Speaker 2: I know. And then you're never sure if she flew back in the box. So you're kind of going through and the bees are all it. Yeah, this is a great tip.

Speaker 3: Yeah, it's I tell you, it's heartbreaking when when you've made a split. You put the queen cage in there for three days. You checked yet they're going to be OK. Everything's going to be good. You take that cork out and then the queen just flies away never to be seen again. So definitely want to avoid that one.

Speaker 2: OK, that's a great tip. And I have a host of stories I would love to share with you. We don't have the time. But OK. OK, now you have the split, the colony, the queen's been introduced. Are you done? Do you have to what do you have to what do you need to keep an eye on for the next little while?

Speaker 3: Well, you're never done with beekeeping. There's always something that needs doing especially with splits, depending on when you made it and your particular area. One big thing I'd be concerned about is the nutrition of the two hives that you now have. Each of them has less of a foraging workforce because you cut their foraging workforce in half to make the two splits. So they might need if there's not a lot of food out there, they might need some supplementary feed either in the form of sugar syrup or pollen patties. And as always, you would need to monitor for disease on those. Excuse me, you need to monitor for disease on both of those. But that should be part of your regular hive checkups.

Speaker 2: That's a really good point, you know, and I think because you have thin things out in the demography it's still not quite a functioning colony. It's going to take a little sorting out and giving it some feed just as a buffer. Seems like such a great, great tip.

Speaker 3: I always do that every split I make. I am everyone has a frame feeder and depending on the time of year, I give them either half a gallon or a full gallon of syrup. Especially, yeah, if they have a week of cold weather and they can't get out of forage, even though there's plenty of flowers out there, they might burn through their stores because you've cut their stores in half. So it's it's it's definitely important to feed them. And that also helps with getting the queen up and running too. If they're well-fed, the queen will lay a lot. And that's what you really want to have that queen well-stimulated to get a nice healthy colony afterward.

Speaker 2: Imagine for gardeners in the audience, that always rings true. Like when you're grafting something, there is a little bit of care. And then the plant coheres and has become a real plant, like the scion and the rootstock have kind of come together. And you don't have to worry. But there is this moment of fragility of like, we need to get the machine running smoothly. And then it can sort of become a real colony.

Speaker 3: And then once everything's once all well, yeah, once it's landed on its feet, so to speak, and everything's going to be OK. Another thing I will mention is that if you're making weaker splits and they're going to go into a location with some strong hives, you might want to consider putting entrance reduces on those hives too, just so that they have a bit of a. And so they're less likely to be robbed out by those stronger hives. So right, right, right.

Speaker 2: Yeah, especially those later in the year, you may hit the hunting flow may be coming off as you're doing this. Yeah, yeah, right. That's exactly right.

Speaker 3: Yeah. So. Yeah, and I will actually I'm going to roll back a little bit because I have a note here that we didn't touch on. Yeah. As far as introducing queens goes. If it's a particularly special queen, now you can pay hundreds of dollars for special queens if you want to.

And the last thing you want is for the bees to go and kill that queen. There is another kind of introduction method, which is fairly foolproof and it's pushing queen cage. And what it is, it's about an eight-inch by or six-inch by six-inch square cage that the bees can't get through. But it allows the queen to walk freely on the comb inside that cage and she can start laying in there.

That really helps the colony to accept the queen because when she starts laying and walking around, she starts producing more pheromones and she would be inside of a cage. I see. Yeah, right. So the push-in cages are what I use for very expensive queens when I'm introducing them.

Speaker 2: You know, as you know, I spent a long time at the Beaver Large Research Farm. And when I first got there, all of T-Bore Zabo's strange queen gadgets, there was this little shed and it was full of like pushing cages and right everything. It was it was like, I wish you had an opportunity. I hope it's all still there. If Dr. Pranell still has stock, this is a great little snapshot of the time, because I guess at the time there was the Alberta Bee Program.

There was this attempt to create Alberta genetics. And it was right. Great work.

I do remember, incidentally, that there was one of the papers he had on one-year versus two-year queens, and he really demonstrated the loss of productivity in the second year.

Speaker 3: Really clear. I've seen that over and over again. It's something that is well known, but I think well ignored because it's a real pain to find queens at the end of the honey flow and it's expensive to replace them. So you just kind of just hope that your old queens will do the job. But I never regret the hard work when it comes to the spring. And I don't have many queens failing, failing in the spring. I am I'm glad that I had a hard time, hard times doing them previously.

Speaker 2: Well, it does raise the question in the whole idea of a split is you're taking one half and putting a new queen. The other half has an old queen. Is there any sense in you going to you're opening up the engine anyway and you got to get to the manifold? You might as well do the oil change at the same time.

Speaker 3: Yeah, and that is that is a fair point. If you need to requeen that colony, there is there's there's no harm. And if you find that queen anyway, you might as well dispatcher and use that opportunity to requeen.

Speaker 2: OK, good. Great. Great tip. OK. Well, let's take a break. I've got a series of questions. I ask all my guests. I'm really curious what an Edmontonian would answer. Sounds good. All right. We'll be back in just one second. OK, we are back. So three questions. The first one is, do you have a pollinator or beekeeping book that you would recommend to our listeners?

Speaker 3: I sure do. And it's it's a hefty one. It's the Hive and the Honey Bee by the Dant. It's I really like it because it's almost 30 chapters. Each chapter is itself a mini-book written by an expert in the field. So it's it covers a broad range of honeybee information right from the history of beekeeping all the way up to how to successfully overwinter bees indoors. So it's it's it's very, very good for for a beekeeper. I haven't even got all the way through it yet because it's a big book, but I definitely would recommend it to anyone who's looking for some honeybee reading.

Speaker 2: I haven't looked at the most recent edition, but the thing I always appreciated about it is, you know, especially somebody who is an expert in their field. Remember, for example, wintering was, I think, Doug McCutcheon, who used to be in Armstrong, British Columbia, wrote the chapter. And there were just things in there that just were not they knew that kind of got captured and you'd never find anywhere else. Like there are little details in there.

Speaker 3: Yeah, that's exactly exactly why I read. I like reading that book because you can feel the expertise in the writing and it's some you there are definitely little gems of information. As you say, you wouldn't you wouldn't really find them elsewhere, but it's things that are just known to experts. That'd be hard to come across otherwise.

Speaker 2: Great book recommendation. The next question I have for you is, do you have a go-to tool?

Speaker 3: I do. Well, I have many, but I think in the spirit of this podcast and the topic, my go-to tool is going to be the Queen Excluder. I think it's an underutilized tool for making splits. It makes the job just so much easier than having to find the Queen. And if you can do the work ahead of time and use the Queen Excluder to keep the Queen where you know she is that will save you a bunch of time.

Speaker 2: It's I think that's such a great point. It's like people just think about it in terms of honey supers, but it is or you could there's a lot of other uses for a Queen Excluder than just, you know, separating your brood from your honey.

Speaker 3: Yeah, there is. I use a Queen Excluder on a daily basis in my cell-building hives. I need to keep the Queen in the bottom box. And I have the developing Queen cells in the top box surrounded by brood. And I also use it in my breeding hive I can so I know exactly where I can find frames with lava of the right age because I've had the Queen excluded to a certain part of the hive. So it's very, very important to me as a Queen Excluder.

Speaker 2: Fantastic recommendation. And I guess the last question we have for you is, do you have a favorite pollinator species? And I always think this is unfair to ask honeybee people, although sometimes honeybee people love honeybees and that's their species. And other times they've got some other crazy things. So what's your answer?

Speaker 3: Well, of course, my answer is going to be honeybees. But I I'm going to I'm going to go a little specific in this. I'm going to tell you my favorite little behavior of honeybees, which is. It's when Virgin Queens first emerge, their first instinct is to go out on a murderous rampage and kill all of their sisters. And I think that that is just it's absolutely brutal, but it's absolutely elegant because they only need one Queen.

So it might as well be the first one that comes out that wins. It's also terrifying for me because as a Queen breeder, if I misjudge things by 12 hours, I can lose an entire crop of Queen cells because the virgin where Virgin emerged and killed all of their sisters. So it's it's my favorite my favorite behavior. But it's also someone that keeps me up at night sometimes.

Speaker 2: That's a great answer. I have a question for you on this because I should know this. But I know I've heard that when the verge when the first virgin gets out by Lucker, Crocker, whatever she comes out, the other virgins that are almost ready to come out actually make a sound, which seems counterintuitive. It would be like, don't you want to be secretive? I know I'm not here and you could escape her wrath. I don't quite get all that. I'm so is.

Speaker 3: Yeah, that's that is something which is which seems counterintuitive. But some research came out last year where they were talking about these sounds and the researchers concluded that those toots that the unmerged virgins are making. I think that their cries for help, actually.

Speaker 2: Oh, this is getting worse and worse. We're ending this episode with a blood bath.

Speaker 3: It can only be once. And so this has a functional use in a hive, which is about to swarm. There are multiple queen cells and they're all ready to emerge at a similar time. And oftentimes, if a hive is very strong, they'll swarm two or three times. Now, these virgins, the virgins that have not yet emerged, if they are killed by their sister, won't be able to lead a new swarm out because they'll be dead. But if they toot and allow and alert the workers around them that, hey, I'm ready to go soon the workers will actually protect those virgins.

Speaker 2: Just in case a second swarm goes, they don't want to like off everybody because then they got to be turned.

Speaker 3: Yeah. So it's it's it seems counterintuitive, but it has its uses.

Speaker 2: Well, the other thing that's always puzzled me is that mated queens in the battery box make the same sound. I was just like, yeah, they do.

Speaker 3: And I'm not sure why they do that, but try for help.

Speaker 2: It's like, get me into the split. Get me in the split now. Stop talking. You can talk about it. Well, it was an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for giving us some guidance. I'm sure lots of listeners are kind of getting ready with their got their queens and they're ready to go. And so this is just been timely information. Thank you so much.

Speaker 3: Oh, you're very welcome. Thanks for having me. And I hope that that I was able to save someone some time. A couple of hours trying to find an elusive queen somewhere out there.

Speaker 2: Me too. All right, you take care. You too. Thank you so much for listening. The show is produced by Quinn Sinan Neil, who's a student here at OSU in the New Media Communications Program. The show wouldn't even be possible without the support of the Oregon Legislature, the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research, and Western Sare Show notes with links mentioned on each episode are available on the website, which is at pollinationpodcast.oregonstate .edu.

I also love hearing from you and there are several ways to connect with me. The first one is you can visit the website and leave an episode-specific comment. You can suggest a future guest or topic or ask a question that can be featured in a future episode. But you can do the same things on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook by visiting the Oregon Bee Project. Thanks so much for listening and see you next week.