Making colony divisions, also called making splits, follows the natural behavior of honey bees. It is the natural behavior of honey bee colonies to build up rapidly in the spring, outgrow their hive, and then divide the population and swarm. By swarming, the bees increase their number of colonies, expand their range, and leave behind old, contaminated hives. When beekeepers make a colony division or split, they are producing an artificial swarm. Splitting bee hives is good beekeeping.

Splitting hives is useful for creating new hives to increase one’s hive numbers, to make hives available for sale, or to replace over-winter colony losses. Splitting hives is also an effective method of controlling swarming.

There are several ways to accomplish splitting. The simplest method, though not necessarily the best method, is the walk-away split. Here, the beekeeper merely takes half of a hive’s resources and puts them in another hive. The beekeeper puts frames of bees, brood, pollen, and honey in a new hive box and leaves the bees to rear a new queen. The bees will detect that they are without a queen in the new hive, and they will produce a new queen if they have the resources. If the split hive is successful in rearing a new queen, she will be laying eggs in about one month.

A more reliable method of making a split is to take frames of bees, brood, pollen, and honey from a strong hive and put them in a new hive along with the colony’s original queen. Then, a new, purchased or locally produced queen is introduced into the original hive. With this arrangement, both hives continue growing with their own queens producing new brood.

A similar method of splitting a hive involves moving frames of bees, brood, pollen, honey, and the original queen to a new hive and then placing a queen cell in the original hive. The queen cell may be a swarm cell or supersedure cell found in another strong hive. The frame containing one or more queen cells may be moved to the hive being split or an individual queen cell may be carefully cut out and moved. Splitting a hive using a queen cell also involves a delay of almost a month before the new queen is laying eggs.

A most important issue in successfully splitting a hive is timing when to start. All too often, beekeepers start the process too early in the year, resulting in poorly mated queens and weak colonies. Before attempting to split hives, it is important to inspect one’s hives and observe the drones. Splitting hives should begin when there are plenty of drones walking on the frames. Queens will need to have plenty of sexually mature drones available in the area for their matings.

--Richard Underhill