When I first started reading about beekeeping, I kept reading about how CCD and all these bee diseases are killing off bees. The statistics were something like 30% of the hives in the US would die off each year. Well, it doesn't take a lot of smarts to realize that too many years of that and pretty soon there's no bees left. I've come face to face with how beekeepers have been "mostly" able to deal with this. You see, I started last year with one hive. As of right now, I have three hives and I did not buy more bees. If we're getting technical there are 4 hives in my backyard, but one of them is my friends and he's keeping it in my backyard just for this season (while he builds a fence on his property to hide the bees from renters). The key is that beekeepers make more hives each year by splitting hives or catching swarms. Now, I already mentioned that my Big Daddy hive swarmed earlier this year (even though I had tried to split it). So I had split the one hive and that gave me hive #2. Well, for a while there after the split and the swarm, I noticed that the Big Daddy hive was queenless. So I bought a queen from a local beekeeper. I put the queen in and then I put on a queen excluder. Now, previously I wasn't a big fan of queen excluders. They make it harder for the bees to get up into the supers in order to lay down the nectar and make honey. However, I was getting the queen up in the supers laying eggs. Now, I'd like to keep my supers just for honey and have the deeps be for the eggs and brood. This is where the queen excluder came in. I figured if I could keep the queen out of the supers for long enough, the bees would be able to lay down nectar and the brood in the supers would hatch out and then things would end up being fine. Queen excluder goes in: fwoosh, chunk. Supers placed back on top. Then a week later, I'm inspecting again, and what do you know, I'm still seeing eggs in my supers! So now, I've got a queen below the excluder and a queen above the excluder! My bees were making me angry. Well, at the time, we had thought that my friend's hive was queenless. So we were able to catch the queen above the excluder (marked) her and placed her in a queen cage. However, upon moving her over to check out his hive and introduce the queen cage. I saw eggs! We then found his queen, and so we marked her.
Instead of killing the queen above the excluder (now in the queen cage). We took the brood in the supers, the queen, and a small number of bees and placed them in a nuc. Thus was born hive #3. This nuc will remain a nuc and will be an insurance policy (queen replacement) for hive #1 and #2 if necessary. So, this splitting of the current hive of bees and providing or allowing the bees to raise a queen is how the US bee population has been able to survive so many years of 20-30% losses.
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