I can do splits! (And you can too)

Bee splits, that is.

Even after a season with dozens of successful splits, they still make me nervous.

Having equipment ready even when you don't know you need it is essential!

What Is a Split?

A walk-away split is when you take resources from one or more colonies to create a new hive and allow the bees to raise their own queen. You provide a frame containing 1–3 day old eggs so the colony can build queen cells. Then you wait. And wait some more. It usually takes 4–6 weeks — and several inspections — before you know if it worked.

A mated queen split is when you create a new colony but provide a mated queen for them. In this case, you’ll usually know within 1–2 weeks whether the queen is accepted and laying.

I think it’s okay that splits make me nervous.

When you split a colony, you’re interrupting one of nature’s most remarkable systems. A healthy hive is a super organism — highly organized, efficient, and astonishingly resilient. In many ways, it’s perfection.

So why mess with that?

Because managed beekeeping is a partnership between bees and beekeeper. We provide safe housing, monitor for pests and disease, and help colonies survive modern pressures they didn’t evolve to handle. In return, sometimes we ask the bees to help us grow.

People make splits for lots of reasons:

1. To help prevent swarming

2. Because giant colonies can become difficult to manage

3. To grow their apiary

4. To sell bees

For a long time, I didn’t enjoy making splits because I didn’t fully trust my skills. So during the 2024 season, I set an intention: make as many splits as possible.

The universe responded.

Practice may not make perfect, but it’s a fantastic teacher — and confidence builder.

In February, one of my client’s colonies was absolutely bursting with bees… followed by armies of drones. Classic signs of swarm season approaching. Since this hive had itself been a massive swarm the previous year, I already suspected the genetics leaned a little “swarmy.”

So we made two walk-away splits and left the mother colony intact to produce honey.

Thankfully, despite the early timing, both new queens successfully mated and the splits are thriving.

And then the mother colony swarmed anyway.

Bees like to keep us humble.

The large peanut shapes are queen cells suggesting this colony is ready to swarm - a great time to split!

The Queen’s Journey

Successfully mated queens? That’s no small thing.

Once a virgin queen hatches, she has to leave the hive, mate with a few dozen drones, and successfully return home without becoming lunch for a dragonfly or bird along the way.

Walk-away splits require two things:

• Understanding the queen lifecycle

• PATIENCE

If you don’t have both… buy a queen.

It takes roughly 30 days to know whether a walk-away split succeeded:

• Workers need about 8 days to create a capped queen cell

• About 8 more days for the queen to hatch (+/- 2 days)

• Then another 12 days or so for mating flights and for her to begin laying (+/- 5 days)

And if it doesn’t work?

You either start all over again… or buy a queen.

So Why Bother?

Because it works. And because it’s one of the most affordable ways to grow an apiary.

What makes a successful split depends heavily on the season, local forage availability, and temperatures.

But generally, a five-frame split includes:

• 1 frame of food

• 2–3 frames of brood with nurse bees to keep larvae fed and brood warm

• 1 frame of drawn comb for the queen to lay in

You can adjust that formula depending on the time of year and whether you’re willing to provide supplemental feed.

I’m writing this blog post while sitting in an apiary waiting for a client whose sister surprised her with two queens. She’s already pulled four splits from her colonies… and now we’re trying to find enough resources for two more.

Beekeeping has a funny way of escalating quickly.

For a full presentation on making splits, check out these slides.