The traditional way to turn one beehive into two beehives is to split the hive. This involves taking a robust hive and removing frames of bees. Frames are the structures inside the traditional boxy Langstroth hives most people associate with beekeeping. Fortunately for me, there is a healthy observation colony at Irvine that regularly needs frames removed from it to give the queen room to lay eggs and prevent the hive from becoming overcrowded.
To get the worker bees to raise a new queen, two frames with bees are removed from this hive (there are only four frames in it total) and are replaced with empty frames. The frames removed will ideally have capped brood (pupa ready to emerge as adults), larva at various stages, eggs, and some capped honey for sustaining the larva. They are placed in a small, half hive called a nuc, short for nucleus. A frame of honey from another hive and two empty frames are placed in the nuc box. The bees will use several of the eggs available to them to rear a new queen in this box. All the frames with the new queen and all the bees are later transferred to a new hive body. The whole process takes close to a month.
There are a few problems, though. The nuc box is made for 19-inch frames. I have top bars that are 17 3/4-inches long. The frames in the nuc normally have cells on them already so the bees don't need to waste energy and resources building wax. Top bars require the bees to build fresh comb.
The solution to the second problem was simple. Since my first hive failed, I had new comb already drawn on three top bars.
To solve the first problem, I simply jury-rigged an extension onto the back wall of the nuc box allowing two of my comb covered top bars to hang from it.
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| I originally screwed this board to three of the top bars. I would later not worry about the screws because the bees would seal the bars in place with propolis. I also kept it to two bars because the comb broke off of one when I dropped it. |
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| How it will look in the nuc box. |
The next time the observation hive needed frames removed, we put them into the nuc with my top bars. Within two weeks, a new queen was walking around in the hive! less than two weeks later, I opened the box to see her inspecting my comb for egg laying purposes. I quickly moved the two bars into my hive body and shook the bees off one of the frames and into my hive. I watched for a bit as the confused bees flew through the air. Fortunately, they were picking up the strong scent from the bees and queen in my hive and many of the bees flew in to join them. Some strayed back to the nuc, however.
The next day, I fed the new colony some 2:1 sugar:water syrup and it was time to wait and hope they would stay in there for the long haul!
