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Primal Bee's new monthly live Q&A
We're now running a live Q&A every month, where a Primal Bee expert takes your beekeeping questions in real time. First up: how to split a hive, with Dr. Jason Graham, who has worked with bees for about 25 years, from the University of Delaware to the honey bee research and extension lab at the University of Florida, with hives in Florida, Hawaii, California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware along the way.
Here's the full session:
Why spring is the best time to split a hive
"Right now is kind of perfect timing," Jason said. Swarm season is when a colony has a natural drive to reproduce, and a split harnesses that drive instead of fighting it.
A split is, in his words, "an artificial swarm." Swarming is how a colony reproduces: it gets strong, raises new queens, and the old queen leaves with about half the bees. Left to swarm on its own, a colony is often set back on both bees and honey, sometimes too far to overwinter well. A split lets you capture that second colony on your terms instead of watching it fly into a neighbor's tree.
It comes with a bonus. While the queenless half spends a couple of weeks raising a new queen, brood rearing pauses, and that brood break also interrupts the varroa mite's breeding cycle, knocking mite levels back at no cost (Utah State University Extension). Primal Bee's screened bottom board and removable varroa tray make the result easy to monitor afterward.
One rule the extension services all repeat: only split a strong colony. A weak or first-year hive needs every bee it has to build up and overwinter, so it isn't a candidate. Beyond that, the conditions matter, flowers blooming, a nectar flow to follow, warm days, all of which give a fresh split what it needs to establish.
When to split your hive vs. add a super
A beekeeper in New Jersey asked whether it was too late to put a super on. Jason's answer reframed the whole decision around what you actually want:
"If you want to increase the number of bees, then you want to do a split. If you want to increase your honey production, then you want to put a super on."
A split costs you in the short term. You're taking an eight-frame colony and starting two four-frame colonies, and both have to rebuild before they're strong enough to make surplus honey. So if a bumper honey crop is the goal this season, supering is the move. If more colonies is the goal, split.
On the supering question itself: it wasn't too late. Jason's checklist for adding a super is a nest box that's about 70% drawn out, with food for the bees and brood below, and a "honey shoulder" along the top of the frames. (More on why that shoulder matters in a minute.) Take the feeder lid off, set the super right on top, and keep adding supers as the bees fill them, roughly when a super hits 70% full. You don't always have to go vertical, either. You can checkerboard frames and pull them as they become honey-bound.
For the full sequence, see the adding-supers guide.
Why you may not need a queen excluder
The same New Jersey beekeeper followed up: heading into a possible dearth, heavy on clover, what about a queen excluder below the super?
Jason's take, after Primal Bee tested both plastic and metal excluders: they tend to get in the way of the beekeeper and the bees. Bees got stuck in the holes. The metal ones didn't fit properly. And they slowed everything down, because the bees didn't move up and draw comb in the super as fast as they did with full access.
His preferred barrier is biological:
"The best queen excluder that you can have is those shoulders of honey at the top of the nest frames in the nest box."
The queen doesn't like to walk across a band of capped honey, so it keeps her laying where she belongs. If a nest frame fills so completely with brood that there's no honey shoulder, Jason adds a super with a couple of already honey-bound frames above the brood to recreate that barrier. And if the queen does sneak up, he finds her, moves her back down, and pulls the frame she started laying in so she's not tempted to return. He says it's rare that she goes up at all.
The queen excluder guide covers the testing behind this in more detail.
How to tell your colony is ready to split
Before you split anything, the colony has to be able to support two. That means plenty of drawn comb and resources, capped and uncapped brood, pollen, nectar, and ideally eggs you can find.
Watch out for false alarms. Those little queen cups along the bottom of the brood sometimes never get an egg, so what looks like queen cells getting started can be nothing. "Observe with patience," Jason said. When the colony genuinely has everything it needs, you're ready to go. (Our strong-vs-weak colony guide covers how to read colony strength before you commit.)
How to find the queen before a split
This is the part most beekeepers dread, and it's where the hive design changes the math. You're only working a seven-to-eight-frame nest, and the queen is usually on the middle three or four frames.
Jason's method: pull the first frame or two that are mostly honey or the follower board to give yourself room, then work the middle frames, separating them so you don't roll her as you lift. Look in the area where there's capped brood, then uncapped brood, then eggs and young larvae. She'll be near the eggs, with a few attendants around her.
What she looks like:
"She's going to have a longer abdomen. Her wings are going to look shorter in proportion to her body compared to the workers."
If you can't find her, you can buy in two queens, one for each colony, as insurance.
How many splits can you make from one hive?
A beekeeper asked how many splits you can make from one hive. This is where Jason got animated, because it's genuinely different on a Primal Bee hive.
One Primal Bee nest frame holds roughly the bees and brood of three deep Langstroth frames. A nuc is five deep frames. So two Primal Bee frames already give you more than a nuc's worth. On a traditional ten-frame Langstroth box, a split usually means five frames here, five frames there: two colonies, maximum.
"Being able to get up to four colonies from each split is pretty amazing."
Asked later whether any common splitting advice is overblown or wrong, Jason couldn't name a piece of conventional wisdom that's flat-out false. The real shift, he said, isn't that the old advice is wrong, it's that the ceiling on how many colonies one hive can produce is higher than most beekeepers picture.
If you split aggressively, get extra queens. Two frames into each daughter colony, four splits from one hive, is realistic, but more queens raises your odds that each one takes. Details in the splitting-colonies guide.
Walk-away split vs. mated queen vs. queen cell
A question that came in over LinkedIn: when do you reach for each? Jason's breakdown of the trade-offs:
A walk-away split is the simplest. Separate the queen from a frame of eggs and young larvae with plenty of nurse bees, and the queenless half goes into emergency queen-rearing mode. As Jason put it, "they'll take one of the worker eggs and feed it royal jelly only and turn that into a queen." You don't need to buy a queen. The catch is risk and time: you wait for the queen to develop, mate, and return, and a lot can go wrong on a mating flight.
Dropping in a mated queen is the low-risk option. Once she's accepted, she can be laying within a couple of days. You pay for the queen, but the colony recovers fastest.
Giving them a queen cell sits in the middle. The queen is already developed, so it's faster than a walk-away split, but she still has to take a mating flight, which depends on the weather and on drones being around.
"Walk away would be fastest [easiest for you], but probably most risky. Dropping in a mated queen would be least amount of risk."
You don't need queen cells before you split, by the way. If you happen to have them, great, the colony has done the work for you. If you don't, removing the queen is what triggers the colony to make them.
The timing behind all of this is what beekeepers call bee math. A queen develops from egg to emergence in about 16 days, with her cell capped around day 9, and then needs roughly another week to harden up, take her mating flights, and start laying. That's why a walk-away split runs broodless for a few weeks, and why the frame you leave behind should carry eggs or very young larvae rather than only older brood. Bees can only raise a quality queen from a young enough larva.
How Dr. Jason Graham splits a hive
Asked for his preferred approach, Jason walks the queen into the daughter colony:
He finds the queen in the mother colony and moves her onto a frame of brood (capped, uncapped, eggs, larvae), adds another frame with pollen and nectar, and gives the new colony room to grow. The colony left behind keeps about seven frames and stays strong, and he lets them raise the new queen. He checks every seven days for queen cells, and around 14 days in he expects to see a capped queen cell with a queen developing. If it didn't take, he can introduce a queen or pull a queen cell from the other colony.
Moving over from a Langstroth setup? The same logic applies. Our colony transfer guide covers shaking the bees into the nest box, moving the queen across, and giving the colony a brood break on fresh comb rather than carrying old frames over.
How to feed a new split
Both colonies need support while they rebuild. Jason recommends a 4:1 sugar solution rather than 1:1, because it puts less excess water into the hive for the bees to evaporate off.
His recipe, from the live (and written up in the feeding guide):
- Fill a mason jar about four-fifths with sugar.
- Add hot water just under boiling, around 200°F.
- Cap it and shake well. The volume drops as the sugar dissolves, so add more hot water and shake again.
- Let it cool slightly before putting it on the hive. It should turn a transparent yellow.
If pollen was scarce when you split, add a pollen patty too. The colonies will want that protein to raise a lot of brood quickly.
One establishment trick for a small split: drop the follower board into the nest to shrink the space the young colony has to cover. A smaller cavity is easier for fewer bees to keep warm and draw out, so they build comb faster; open it back up as the population grows. (See starting from a split.)
How to stop a split from drifting back
Drift is the beginner's nightmare: you split, and the bees fly back to the original spot. Several questions circled this, and Jason had a stack of fixes:
- Aim the entrances in opposite directions to reduce drift between the two hives.
- Stagger hives on a stand, one set forward a couple of feet, the next set back, alternating.
- Space them out. Six feet apart is a good minimum, nine feet is better, and even three feet helps.
- Swap footprints to rebalance. If one hive bleeds foragers to the other, on a nice morning before the bees fly, physically switch the two hives' positions. A single day of foragers returning to the "wrong" box evens things out.
- Visual landmarks. Bees distinguish shapes, so a circle, square, or triangle at each entrance helps them recognize their own home. Jason mentioned Primal Bee has entrance decals coming soon for exactly this.
Placement basics are in the site preparation guide.
When is it too late to split a hive?
Temperature is the limit. You want a nice day above 50°F to open the colony, because the bees have to reset the nest's thermostat after you're in there. Below 50°F is pushing it.
"Ideally 60 degrees... that's kind of the ideal temperatures for me. That's a bit conservative. You could still get away with a split at 50 degrees."
Timing is geographic. In California, Jason splits in April or May with strong overwintered colonies, or waits until June–July if a colony needs more time to build. Fall splits work too, catching the last nectar flow: it gives a brood break heading into winter, and you can close the colony down and feed.
What to do if your split fails
You'll know it failed if the daughter queen never starts laying and the bees aren't drawing comb. The fix is one of the quiet advantages of running two hives: you can borrow from the stronger one.
Pull a frame of brood from the stronger colony, shake the bees off, and add it to the struggling one. A few thousand extra workers can turn it around, and if there are eggs on that frame, the colony gets another shot at raising a queen. Introducing a mated queen helps right away. If everything collapsed, give them a few weeks and try the split again.
And don't take a failure personally. Even with solid technique, not every split takes, and a rejected queen or a mating flight gone wrong is part of the process every beekeeper runs into.
Two beekeeping pro tips from the Q&A
A couple of questions wandered off the splits topic and turned into the most fun answers of the session. Worth keeping in your back pocket.
(Designer note: style these two as visually distinct "pro tip" callout boxes.)
Pro tip — Turn one hive into a nuc factory. An advanced beekeeper on the live wanted to sell nucs out of a Primal Bee hive, and Jason walked through a clever workaround. Drop four extra follower boards into the nest box, leaving the queen only about three frames to lay on. Cramped below, she moves up and starts laying in the super. As she fills super frames with eggs and young brood, you lift those frames into Langstroth nucs and let each one run as a walk-away split. Keep the queen up in the super while you harvest, so you don't accidentally bank her into a nuc. When you're done making nucs, find her, move her back down to the nest box, and swap the follower boards back out for drawn comb or foundation so she has room to lay again. (Extra follower boards aren't listed online; email the team for a price list.)
Pro tip — Fix spotty, patchy comb. One beekeeper's bees were drawing comb unevenly in the honey areas. Jason's fix is redistribution. On your next inspection, scrape the burr comb off the tops of the frames and trim any bridge comb, the wonky stuff growing vertically off the foundation and bridging two frames together. Don't toss that wax. Press it onto the bare spots where you want the bees to start drawing, to give them a head start. Then push the frames snug together, top and bottom. It's a spacing problem: bees want about 3/8 inch of walking room between combs, and any gap wider than that, they'll fill with strange comb. Close the gaps and the wonky comb has nowhere to go.
Why a roomier nest makes splits easier
Most of what makes splits easier on a Primal Bee hive comes back to one thing: the nest holds the equivalent of three Langstroth deeps on eight frames. The queen rarely runs out of room, so there's less reason to swarm. And when you do inspect, you're reading eight frames instead of 24, which makes queen cells far easier to spot.
The bees were always going to reproduce. A split just lets you decide where the second colony lives.
Have a topic you want covered on the next live? Primal Bee runs these monthly, plus office hours twice a week. Drop your question in the group.
