Greetings readers. I am trying something new in this month’s column. Increasingly, many of you are going to Large Language Models (LLMs) with your questions about bees. ChatGPT is one such LLM. I have seen colleagues and other authors compare how they would answer a specific question to how ChatGPT answers the same question. I thought it was time to jump into this fun game and try this myself. In this article, I list five questions I received from readers. I typed my answer to each question. I identified it as “My answer.” Then, I pasted the exact question in ChatGPT and copied its answer under “ChatGPT answer.” I always answered the question first to avoid any influence from ChatGPT on my thought process.
One of the neat functions of LLMs is that you can instruct them to answer questions from the perspective of someone else or a group of people. For example, you can instruct ChatGPT to answer the question as if it were a commercial beekeeper, a bee scientist, or even Micky Mouse. I have a theological study group in which a friend of mine takes a theological concept and asks Grok (another LLM) to discuss the topic from the perspective of four different theologians. In response, we are given an overview of how these theologians would address the topic. Whether this is accurate or not is up to debate. However, I feel that LLM responses will improve over time.
Building upon this, you can ask ChatGPT to answer bee-related questions as if they were “Jamie Ellis, honey bee professor from the University of Florida.” I did that with each question and copied the answers here. In short, what you get in this article is:
- The reader’s original question,
- ChatGPT’s answer (with the prompt: Please address the following text in one to two paragraphs),
- ChatGPT’s answer as if it were me (with the prompt: Please address the following text in one to two paragraphs. Answer as if you were Jamie Ellis, honey bee professor from the University of Florida), and
- My actual answer.
This was fun and I hope you enjoy reading the similarities and differences between each answer.
Q: Locating splits or captured swarms
I am finishing my first year of beekeeping. I have limited space in my apiary — a suburban backyard currently with two honey bee hives, but with the potential to hold up to four. I would like to keep the apiary small for now, i.e., two to three hives. Both of my colonies started from nucs in May 2025. I want to be more proactive in managing to prevent swarms, but it is not clear to me if I am able to split and keep the new hive/colony close to the original colony, i.e., within three to ten feet of the current hive. Do you have any suggestions?
Additionally, if I were able to capture a swarm that I think may have been from one of my colonies, can their new hive be in the same, small apiary space?
Shane Fitzgerald
Illinois, January
Answer
ChatGPT answer
Congratulations on finishing your first year — that’s a big milestone. In a small suburban apiary like yours, keeping two to three colonies is very manageable, and splitting is one of the best proactive swarm-prevention tools you can use. You can keep a split three to ten feet from the parent colony, but you’ll likely see significant drift of returning foragers back to the original hive if you do nothing to differentiate them. To reduce this, move the original hive a few feet and put the split in its place (so returning foragers boost the split), or temporarily block entrances with grass to force reorientation flights. Distinct hive colors, patterns, and different entrance directions also help minimize drift. In tight spaces, careful population balancing — shifting brood and nurse bees rather than relying on field bees — is especially important. Since your colonies began as nucs in May 2025, they should be strong enough this coming season to support a well-timed spring split before swarm cells are capped.
If you capture a swarm that likely came from one of your colonies, you can absolutely house it in the same small apiary. Bees can coexist very closely as long as each colony has its own clearly defined entrance and sufficient resources. Swarms are typically very docile and orient quickly to a new location, even within a few feet of their origin. Just ensure adequate space, ventilation, and nectar flow (or supplemental feeding if needed) so competition doesn’t stress the colonies. In a compact backyard setup, thoughtful timing, visual differentiation of hives, and regular inspections during swarm season will be your most effective tools for maintaining a small, healthy apiary.
ChatGPT prompted to answer as if it were me
As a beekeeper working in a suburban backyard with limited space, you’re thinking about exactly the right things at the right time. First, yes — you absolutely can split a colony and keep the new hive within three to ten feet of the original hive. Bees orient to location, not to some fixed “home range,” so if both colonies are in the same small apiary, they will sort themselves out after reorientation flights. That said, when you make a split and place it very close to the parent colony, you’ll often see drift of returning foragers back to the original hive. To balance populations, I typically recommend moving the original hive a few feet to one side and placing the new split in the original hive’s location. That way, field bees returning from foraging boost the split. If you leave them side by side in their existing positions, just be aware the split may need extra support (brood or resources) until it builds up.
Regarding swarm prevention, being proactive is key — especially in Florida’s long season. Strong colonies in their second year are much more swarm-prone than first-year nucs. Stay ahead of congestion by adding space early, keeping young queens (requeening annually helps), and making small controlled splits before they feel crowded. As for capturing a swarm that may have issued from one of your colonies, you can absolutely keep it in the same small apiary. Bees do not require separation distance from their parent colony once rehived. In fact, in small-scale backyard operations like yours, two to four colonies in close proximity is very manageable. The key is maintaining colony strength and preventing one hive from becoming excessively stronger than the others, which is often the real driver of swarming in tight apiaries.
My answer
You can split colonies and keep the split (new colony) in the same apiary containing the colony from which you made the split (parent colony). I do this all the time. The key is recognizing you are going to lose bees from the new colony back to its parent colony. You can overcome this by making the new colony overly strong in anticipation of losing bees to the parent colony. Let me explain.
For argument’s sake, let us say that you want to split a parent colony housed in a double-deep hive. This hive contains twenty frames of bees/brood and the split will be a 5-frame nuc. I would go into the double-deep hive and remove one frame of honey/pollen and place that into the nuc. This will serve as the resource frame for the nuc. Then, I would remove and transfer four frames full of capped brood from which I see bees emerging from some cells. Using capped brood is a hedge against some of the adult bees flying back to the parent colony. The capped brood will emerge into the nuc. The newly emerged adults do not know they were produced in another colony. They view the nuc as their hive. Thus, even if you lose some adult bees back to the original hive, you instantly have emerging brood to replace them.
In addition to this, I would shake one to three frames of adult bees into the nuc. This make the nuc really strong and capable of losing some of its bees back to the parental colony. Of course, it is usually best to move the nuc to a different apiary >3 miles (>4.8 km) from the one housing the parental colony. Yet, creating strong nucs from which you expect a little drift back to the parental hive is a good second option …
