Splitting The Hive - Keeping Backyard Bees

This year, our hive is doing wonderfully! The bees are incredible active and the brood and honey are quickly filling up all the hive space we can give them.

A couple weeks ago we checked the bees. At the time our hive only consisted of two large brood boxes. These boxes are meant for the bees to raise brood and honey for the continuance of the colony.

Upon inspection, we found that these boxes were almost completely full. The bees usually work from the center frames out to the outer frames, and all were full of healthy brood and honey except for the two outer frames, which were about half full.

Some of the bees fanning the hive entrance to control the temperature.

We decided it would be a good time to add our harvest box and queen excluder. The queen excluder is a thin plastic layer with small slits. The slits are large enough to allow worker bees to pass through, but too small for the queen to fit. This prevents the queen from laying eggs in the harvest boxes and keeps the harvest honey clean.

After adding the harvest box, we began second guessing our decision. At this point in our bee keeping, we are more interested in expanding our number of colonies, than having a good honey harvest. We’ve been looking for a good opportunity to split our hive and decided that maybe we should concentrate on that.

To understand how to split a hive, you have to understand a bit about the bee’s instinct to swarm.

If you don’t give bees ample room in their hive, they will swarm to find a new home with more space. If they swarm half (or more) of your bees will take off with the old queen. The bees left behind will sense that the queen is gone and make a new queen by feeding royal jelly to a larvae.

When you split a hive in a controlled setting, you force the bees into a swarming situation. It’s best to split the hive when it’s getting very full. The bees will begin preparing to make another queen and you will know this by finding queen cells in your hive.

To properly split a hive, you should add a frame with one of these queen cells to a new hive box. Then alternate empty frames with frames filled with brood from the original colony.

Our mistake came in that we added the harvest box right when they were “probably” getting ready to begin preparing to swarm.

This immediately gave the bees more room in their box and they lost the desire to leave to find a larger home.

But after inspection of some of the brood frames we found that there were plenty of brood in all stages of life. Even some very young larvae.

We decided to split the hive anyway in the hopes that the new hive would sense the absence of a queen and feed one of the eggs/young larvae royal jelly to create a new queen in the new hive.

We figure, worst case scenario is that the bees will leave the new hive and return to the old.

Right now the bees are attending to both hives. We will know if the split worked if we check the new hive in a few weeks and see evidence of a queen cell, or brood in the new, empty cells.

Tags

• Iron Oak Farm
• Jennifer Sartell

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8 Comments

Mike Rice says: July 9, 2015 at 8:50 pm

When you do your splits, shouldn’t you put the old queen in the new split since she is the one that would leave anyway if they were to swarm? With queen cells present, the old queen normally stops or slows down egg production to get her weight down so she can fly. Just my thought. Mike

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Cliff says: July 9, 2015 at 9:58 pm

I did a hive split this spring. It was my first and has been mildly successful. There are a lot of good video’s on youtube and once I had poured and agonized over them for some time I went for it. I could go into a lot of details but with limited space I’ll just say this. My hive was 3 brood boxes and 1 honey super. The bees had brood in frames of all 3. (it was spring and while there was some honey on all the frames they were obviously interested in expanding the hive) I grabbed 3 frames with brood in various stages from the deeps and 2 frames from the super. All with brood in them. Based on what I had seen in multiple video’s I didn’t worry about the queen at all. I placed the 3 deep frames in the brood box and placed the 2 frames from the honey super into another super and laced these directly over the 3 frames in the brood box. Internally it result in kind of a pyramid shape within the hive. And that was it…… Within a month I had evidence of a laying queen in the new hive and it’s continued to grow all summer. currently hit has 2 deeps and a honey super on it. The original hive has done exceptional. There are 2 deeps and 3 honey supers. It’s quite a towering hive and 2 of the honey supers are full and they are working on the 3rd. Last week it was about 30% full. I’m planning on harvesting from it in about 2 more weeks. I’ll leave the split hive alone and let those bees continue with expanding the hive and getting ready for winter. Despite all the agonizing the truth is it was really simple. The only trip being to wait until the hive you are taking the split from is beginning to fill with brood THEN making sure you take frames for the new hive that have brood in ALL stages of development.

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Tom Smith says: November 19, 2016 at 3:24 pm

What a brilliant idea the Top Entrance Bee Hive is. So simple and yet practical. I can’t see any objections to it and so will definitely try it out on a couple of hives come next spring. If I have any problems I’ll let you know

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Maggie Watte says: April 12, 2017 at 3:18 pm

So when you did your split, is your split hive next to the hive from which it was taken? I’m a newbie and will be inspecting my colony here in Idaho soon.

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Kevin McGillicuddy says: June 15, 2017 at 12:39 am

Thank you for your awesome insight. I have opy one hive at this time. To purchase anuc right now, if I could find one would be too expensive. Have you ever done anything with package bees?

I am getting ready to do a split and I like your ideas.

Thanks again.

If you have a website that I could follow your success on that would be great.

God Bless All of Your Beekeeping

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melvin says: February 10, 2020 at 5:07 am

Thank You That make a lot of sense. I have watched SEVERAL videos And your few paragraphs gave me more clarity than any of them.I have only had my bees since April 2019 ,and lest fall my inspector told me I should split them this spring. They are very prolific. Thanks again. Melvin

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Jan says: April 2, 2020 at 4:50 pm

Thank you for this wonderful informative and easily read information. New keepers get overwhelmed with everything out there and the easiest reading is always the best. Teas, bees and blessings on you and your girls…jan

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MUKISA ALEX says: February 19, 2021 at 11:30 am

Thax alot 4 that information . can’t i split my hive using only two brood frames

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