Making a new colony is a very fun activity in the Spring. If left alone to their own actions, Honey Bee colonies will perform this action every spring in an attempt to make a genetic copy of their successful genes. When the bees do this on their own we call this behavior a “Swarm”. When beekeepers trigger this behavior manually, we call this a “Split”.
As a beekeeper we would rather perform a split manually and satisfy the honey bee’s instinctive desire to swarm. During a swarm, the beekeeper will loose over half of the colony to the swarm and may never see those bees again. In a swarm the original queen takes over half the hive out to find a new home somewhere far away. A beekeeper can prevent this behavior by performing splits.
A split is simply the act of opening up a hive and taking out 2-3 frames of brood and leaving behind the queen with the mother colony. Taking out frames of bee brood will slow the mother colony down and make them less likely to swarm.
The new split has tons of workers and brood at different stages of development. The worker bees will choose a larva at the correct stage of development and begin turning that larva into a queen. Thereby, in about 25 days, this new colony will have a mated queen ready to start laying eggs. The video below is following the worker bees create a queen cell and raise a new queen.