Pulling a frame with brood, food and the queen to make a nuc at spring buildup is mostly what I do with my hives. Those nucs can be used as replacements and are an excellent way to get a failed going quickly. I don't let mine raise their own queen (if I can help it but I will keep a really good queen at times) because my game is all about keeping a diverse gene pool so I use many different races and sources for queens; I prefer to re-queen the main hive or splits from them if they are large enough. I don't see how the method would yield such an increase in honey production unless he's talking about honey production if you let the hive swarm but I've been wrong many times before! If you run into him again, you might ask why his bees increase honey production so much. I'd like to hear the answer too. To me, maximizing honey production is all about getting the number of bees (and healthy ones) in a hive to nearly peak, without swarming, at the time your main nectar flow gets going. Since that varies regionally, among different apiary sites, seasonally and from year-to-year (due to weather variations within a year), optimizing honey production requires knowledge of the area, the site and of current weather patterns and likely weather trends. Not fool proof and even folks who've been keeping bees in a specific area for many many years still misjudge the conditions at times.