Making splits
Updated
What a split is
You divide a colony into two boxes: one keeps the queen, the other gets brood and eggs and raises a new one. Both halves rebuild. Penn State publishes this as Colony Division: An Easy Method to Split a Colony, and the method is less delicate than people expect.
When
Late April or May in temperate regions, and the timing has a reason. Splitting before a major nectar flow lets both halves rebuild their populations in time to work it, which is what stops a split costing you the season's honey.
Split too late and you have two colonies too small to make a crop and too small to winter well. Split too early and there is not enough brood to divide.
The simple method
- Find frames with eggs and young larvae. The queenless half needs these to raise a queen from, and eggs are the proof you have what you need.
- Take brood, stores and bees into the new box. Several frames of each, with the adhering nurse bees.
- Decide where the queen goes and know which box she is in before you close up.
- Move one half away, or the flying bees return to the original site and the split is left with only nurse bees.
Which half gets what
The queenright half continues as normal and will build fastest. The queenless half spends roughly a month raising and mating a queen, during which it makes no new bees and shrinks. That gap is the real cost of a split and it is why the timing matters so much.
You can shorten it by buying a mated queen instead, which turns a month into a few days and is usually worth the money if the split is meant to produce honey this year.
After
Leave the queenless half alone. Opening it repeatedly to check on queen cells is how a split fails: a virgin queen out on a mating flight and a beekeeper with the lid off are a bad combination.
Check for eggs about four weeks later. Eggs mean you have a laying queen and the split worked.