# Splitting a Hive



## Falls-Acre (May 13, 2009)

I have 2 physical hives. Last year I put 2 packages of bees in them, but only 1 survived, the other I guess died off. The remaining hive is strong and thriving. I still want to maintain 2 hives, so I was thinking I could split some of the bees from the strong hive to the other hive boxes and add a new queen. Would this work? What is the best way to do a split? How many frames should be moved? The empty boxes are already drawn comb.


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## TxGypsy (Nov 23, 2006)

You can do it that way, or you can see if your bees will raise a new queen for you. 

If you want to see if your bees will raise you a new queen there are several ways you can go about it. You can move your queen, a frame of capped or about to be capped brood and a frame of honey over to the new hive. That leaves the strong hive to raise queen cells. They have lots of workers and stores to raise the best queen that they can. Be sure that they have plenty of young larvae to work with. 

You can also move a few frames of brood over to the new hive along with nurse bees and let the weaker hive raise a queen. Make sure you include frames of emerging bees so that the hive will build up enough population to raise a queen. I'd give them a day or two to really accept that they are queenless and then give them a frame of young brood to make a queen from.

The more sure way is to buy a queen and then place her in the new hive with a frame or 2 of brood and the nurse bees that are hanging onto the frames. If your established hive is getting congested as they tend to do at this time of the year you may want to checker board your existing hive and place more frames of brood and stores into the new hive. Place her into the hive as you would with a package and let the bees free her from her shipping cage.


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## DW (May 10, 2002)

This is our project for spring. My husband even went to class. Put some brood in a new box, put queen excluder on under new box w/new queen. Give them a week and then move the new box. Since we are new at this, we are going to purchase a queen.


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## alleyyooper (Apr 22, 2005)

Here is a link to a post I did several years ago on splitting bee hives with pictures.

http://www.homesteadingtoday.com/livestock-forums/beekeeping/303375-splitting-bee-hive.html

I havn't used the cloak board my self to raise a queen in the split. I usally take a proven queen from a nuc to put in the split and let the nuc raise a new one from the cell punch grafts I do. 

 Al


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