When doing operations in a hive, it is better to do it two people and each of them needs to have worn a bee suit for protection. To divide a colony, you need to have two hives that are identical n structure i.e. the mother hive and the new hive. Divide the frames and move some frames that have the brood and honey into the new hive. Much of the honey can be transferred into the new hive since the old colony can readily make the honey again.
Developing a queen
A hive only survives if it has its own queen and hence there is a need to develop a new queen for the new hive during colony division. This can be done using a needle or thorn.
Using the needle or thorn, open about 5 cells containing bee brood that is in the early stages of development of between 1 to 3 days and usually the brood is white in color. Opening the cells gently enables the young ones in these cells to continue being fed on royal jelly which enables them to grow faster than those whose cells have not been opened and one of these will grow into the queen.
After the queen has hatched, it will kill the other emerging queens and forms a queen cell anywhere on the frame. The bees will cage the queen cell and continue feeding it with royal jelly.
Killing the other emerging queens indicates that the developing queen will develop and mature into a queen and take on the roles f a queen in the hive.
Precautions taken
Ensure that the exact number of frames moved from the old colony to the new hive are replaced with empty frames from the new colony.
Divide the bees into 2 and move some bees to the new hive.
If you have a queen cage, you need to first cage the queen in the old hive before beginning the operations. In case you have no queen cage, refrain from transferring bees that are too many in a single place because most likely the queen is among them.
Inspect the new hive after every 7 hours for the first 2 days. Put honey or sugar syrup in the new hive to help keep the bees together or else keep the hives close to each other so that the bees can still use the pheromone from the old queen to stick together as the new queen develops.
