In this article, we look at the practice of splitting a hive to prevent swarming. We often are confounded by working out how to stop bees from swarming. A simple swarm control split can stop the loss of swarms.
A beehive is governed by pheromones. The queen pheromone controls the workers, and, if a queen is not able to produce enough queen pheromones, the workers make queen cells...
If we take a hive when it is building up, and remove some of the bees and brood combs in that hive to a new box we are reducing the population of the parent box. Normally we split into a five-frame nucleus box, or if we have two brood boxes, we can split these into two hives.
You can introduce a new queen into the queen-less split. It is generally better to do this one to two days after splitting the hives so that they have had time to realize they do not have a queen.
If you split a hive after they have swarmed you have basically missed the point of the split and lost half of your bees.All is not lost, however, and normally near every apiary I have, I place a couple of old beehives on a roof, or in trees and you will often find that you will catch the swarms which leave if there is a strong honey flow on the go.