My partner has friends that had often talked to me about their native bee hive (being that I keep both native bees and European honeybees). When I visited their hive I was surprised to find two flourishing hives side by side. I asked when they had done the split. They hadn’t!

Like S & G above they had simply put an empty hive beside there existing hive and the bees had moved in. For that to happen was extremely unlikely (as Tim mentions above) but it did happen.

I guess the moral of the story is if you try something enough times perhaps it will happen. That doesn’t make it the best/most efficient way forward though. I have been using soft splits/eductions for years and still have a very slow turnaround time with them. A soft split is another method of hive propagation that is I guess halfway between catching a swarm and the tried and tested hive split). If you want more hives, splitting is the way to go.