I'm thinking of doing the following next year. Tell me where I may go wrong:
1. Set up hive boxes for new hive in the location it will be at.
2. Take the boxes from a hive that I'm going to split and stack them in reverse order that they were in next to new hive location.
3. Take the top box in the stack and place on new hive.
4. put an empty box (no frames) on the top of the box I just placed on the new hive.
5. Put a fume board on top of the empty box and drive the bees out of the box that I put on the new hive down into the new hives lower boxes.
6. Take the empty box and the box that was just vacated of bees off of the new hive and put the vacated box back in its original place (bottom of old hive).
7. Repeat for all boxes in the stack.
When done, I should have all the bees from the old hive in the new hive including the queen. The old hive will be back in it's original order and just have capped brood and foraging bees that have returned. I expect foraging bees that went into the new hive from this process to leave the new hive and fly back to the old hive. End result would be a new hive with queen and non-foraging young nurse bees and the old hive with old foraging bees and brood that they can make a new queen from. Same result as a Taranov split if it works but without all the shaking of bees everywhere. Think it will work? I may have to block escape entrances of the new hive during the process so that the fume board will not drive the queen and nurse bees out of the new hive. I would probably put a couple of frames of honey in the new hive to try to keep them there. Would wait a few minutes after the last time of using the fume board to open the entrance. Would use a screened bottom board on new hive most likely.
1. Set up hive boxes for new hive in the location it will be at.
2. Take the boxes from a hive that I'm going to split and stack them in reverse order that they were in next to new hive location.
3. Take the top box in the stack and place on new hive.
4. put an empty box (no frames) on the top of the box I just placed on the new hive.
5. Put a fume board on top of the empty box and drive the bees out of the box that I put on the new hive down into the new hives lower boxes.
6. Take the empty box and the box that was just vacated of bees off of the new hive and put the vacated box back in its original place (bottom of old hive).
7. Repeat for all boxes in the stack.
When done, I should have all the bees from the old hive in the new hive including the queen. The old hive will be back in it's original order and just have capped brood and foraging bees that have returned. I expect foraging bees that went into the new hive from this process to leave the new hive and fly back to the old hive. End result would be a new hive with queen and non-foraging young nurse bees and the old hive with old foraging bees and brood that they can make a new queen from. Same result as a Taranov split if it works but without all the shaking of bees everywhere. Think it will work? I may have to block escape entrances of the new hive during the process so that the fume board will not drive the queen and nurse bees out of the new hive. I would probably put a couple of frames of honey in the new hive to try to keep them there. Would wait a few minutes after the last time of using the fume board to open the entrance. Would use a screened bottom board on new hive most likely.