It takes more resources than the other way I mentioned, but it’s easier!
Want to make a new colony and you don’t have a lot of time in the bee yard? It doesn’t have to be hard to make a new colony (or five.)
With this method, you will be giving your large colony a brood break. This is a good thing, depending on your management practices. It will disrupt the brood cycle for the variable mite.
How to do it
I like to find my queen, and take about half the emerging brood frames and put them in a nuc box. I’ll only be giving her five frames total (assuming I’m doing this in mid-late spring, or early summer, depending on your flow.) I give her a frame of honey, but leave all the eggs and young larva with the original colony. She will keep laying eggs, and be able to build back up very quickly.
Now that the eggs and larvae are in the original hive and the queen and half the emerging brood are in the nuc, you can pretty much close it up, and wait for about 4-6 days. Then VERY carefully inspect the larger queenless colony to ensure you have at least one good looking queen cell. If you don’t, place another frame of eggs and larvae in that hive.
What to expect
About three weeks from when you start this process, you should have a newly mated queen that may have begun to lay in the original hive, and a booming nuc or single deep hive where you initially placed the original queen. Keep a close eye on the nuc with the queen in it. They will expand very quickly and you don’t want to induce a swarm.
This is what I do if I don’t have a lot of time in the bee yard, but want to get a split. You can also watch for multiple frames with queen cells, and if the amount of resources you have allows for this, you can divvy them up, and make multiple nucs this way. So far, this is the easiest method I’ve found for doing splits, that also accommodates me wanting to know where my queen is and which hives are queenless at any given time.
Want to be more efficient with your resources? Check out this post: https://agirlandherbees.com/a-simple-way-to-make-splits/