Swarms and Splits: A Workshop for Second Year Beekeepers

April 5, 2025, 9:00 - 11:00 a.m.

If you’ve gotten your beehive through its first winter in Colorado, congratulations! You’re about to have a second-year hive!

With a second-year hive comes all new adventures in beekeeping, one of the most important of which is swarming. When a colony swarms, not only does a beekeeper lose their valuable experienced queen, but other issues such as a failure to produce a new queen or swarms moving into dangerous locations can occur. It is in a beekeeper’s best interest to learn how to artificially create a “swarm” by doing a split to prevent their bees from becoming a community nuisance. It is also beneficial for new beekeepers to learn about swarm behavior and how they can get themselves free bees by becoming swarm catchers.

In this workshop, you’ll learn all about swarms, including:

Signs that a colony is going to swarm.
How to prevent your hive from swarming.
Method to make more hives by making splits.
Basic swarm-catching techniques.

Pricing:

Member: $35
Non-members: $40

Meet our Bee Expert

Lorna McCallister is a biologist from Tampa, Florida. She studied wildlife biology at the University of Florida, with a minor in Entomology. She also completed her Master's degree at the University of Florida with a thesis focused on insect and avian pollinator communities in southern Africa. She learned beekeeping through courses at UF, the Tampa Bay Beekeepers Association, and interning with the Elephants and Bees Project in Sri Lanka and Kenya. Lorna is now the Target Species Manager at Butterfly Pavilion, where she works on pollinator and invertebrate research and manages Butterfly Pavilion's honey bee hives.