Splits the best way?

[paulnewbee1]

I am going to split two hive what is the best way to do and how do you make sure the queen is not in the one I will spilt? thanks for all your help in the last four years.
Paul

[Ravenseye]

"Best" is a relative term. The "easiest" way is to make a nuc from a few frames of fresh eggs and brood. Make sure some honey and pollen is in there and let them make their own queen. You need to find the queen on your donor hive and isolate her while you make up the nuc. Shake some extra bees into your nuc so that you have extra bees in case some drift back to the old hive.

That's the easiest way. It also means that the nuc now has to grow a queen and she needs to mate successfully before she settles into laying. That means a month's delay before your nuc starts to "grow" again. So, if you want to shorten that time, add a store bought queen to the nuc. Again, you first have to find and isolate your donor hive's queen.

[B. Haning]

The easiest way I have found to make a split without finding the queen is using a queen excluder as follows. Pull frames of open brood with eggs and larvae, pull some frames with honey and pollen too. Shake all the bees off of these frames and replace them with drawn comb or frames of foundation. Place the queen excluder on top of the hive and put the frames that were shaken above the excluder. Put the lid on the hive a leave it for a day. Nurse bees will come through the queen excluder and cover the brood. These frames of bees have no queen and will accept a purchased queen readily. Set the bees off on their own bottom board give them a queen and treat them as a new split.

[Tom G. Laury]

That's just how I do it too, although I move them to a different location.
If you place the new colony in the same apiary, just use two frames of brood but shake in twice as many bees as you want because half will go back to the old spot. The worst is using too much brood but not enough bees.

[tecumseh]

best? if everyone knew best they would drive a dodge.

the only exacting way to do splits is as b haning suggest (ie sieve out the queen)*. I prefer the more random walk method myself. So in doing splits I ruthlessly split a full hive into X number of replications. in about 50% of these I see the queen and set her aside into a nuc which I mark as queen right.. then either cell or place laying queens in the remainder. in the other 50% where I do not locate the queen... if I am using queen cells I plug cells into all and if I am using mated queens I come back two days later to see who is and who is not drawning new queen cells (the cups are quite small but easy to identify at that time).

*ps the same thing can be accomplished by brushing off frames for splitting and placing these above a queen excluder the day prior to making up nucs.