Making Splits

In early spring as your colony expands, it is possible the bees get crowded and decide to ‘swarm’ where the queen and a fair percent of the bees leave the hive. Swarming is a natural method of reproducing. Two main reasons for swarming: reproductive swarming early in the season, and overcrowding later when the hive population has increased. The beekeeper needs to monitor the hive to ensure the bees have space – if the colony doesn’t have room to place brood or nectar, they will decide to reduce the number of bees in the colony by swarming.

To split:

If you find queen cells in the hive and want to prevent a swarm, and can find your queen, take the frame with the queen and place it in a new hive body along with 1-2 frames of food stores and some frames with open brood, and empty comb. You will be leaving the queen cell frames as well as most of the capped brood in the original hive. Ideally, place the old queen in the new hive as far away from the original hive to prevent bees returning to the hive with the old queen.

If you are unable to find your queen, you can shake ALL the bees off 2-3 frames of brood ; place a queen excluder on the top brood box, then an empty box with the brood frames. Put the lid on; after a couple of hours the nurse bees will have moved up to the brood frames and you can introduce a new queen to this box and start a new hive.

There are many decent videos that demonstrate how to do a split; a couple are:

https://youtu.be/bwVDR_2nCq0?si=k15nF40j17zKicfd

Bob Binnie goes through making splits without finding the queen

https://www.youtube.com/live/g9qQsMzL_uU?si=OMiWtsQVm8VerE4y

David Burns explains spring management and making splits