If you have a good strong hive with two deeps and honey production is no issue. How many splits could you make out of that one hive giving them enough time to build up for winter with syrup and pollen provided daily?
Depends on how many frames of brood you have. We consider 1 frame to be a weak split, 2 frames makes a good split during a flow, 3 frames is a strong split.
Scott
you provide each split with a new queen correct? is a queen castle well suited for splits or should i move them to small nucs?
I concur with hardwood. if you want to get as many as you can go with 3 frames per split. one with eggs one with capped brood and one with honey. leave the bees on them when you split them. one hive will have the queen and the rest will raise a queen. you will be able to tell because the ones that don't have a queen will be mean as :evil:. until they raise one. if the flow is good they will build quickly. if not they will build slower. I try not to feed mine. they seem to build stronger hives when nature goes her course. plus personally i believe it introduces less disease opportunities.
We use 5-frame nucs. The balance of the frames are honey/pollen stores but we always leave one empty frame for expansion, both for incoming stores and so the bees can spread out during hot times.
Each split needs either a queen or queen cell or eggs so they can make their own.
Scott
If you're having a good summer and want to be very aggressive I think you could get up to a 10x split IF you can successfully winter nucs. I have gotten 9x before. My guess is Newark is a good place to raise bees, although I asked Dawes if they ever kept bees; they didn't.
A double deep in Ohio will be (should be) packed with bees in June. If you're going for max splits, I would probably split a strong June hive into 3 big hives and queen the 2 new hives with purchased queens. Big hives build up much quicker than small ones. Let those 3 big hives build up until the last week of July and then split each of them up. As Scott and Divemaster says, go with at least 2 frames of brood for the July split. 1 frame is just too small. 3 frames of bees would be ideal.
You could let the 9 July splits raise their own queens or you could buy more queens for them. I would probably just let them make their own. If so, they would then start raising new bees about the last week of August. That is still enough time to get a nuc built up in Ohio IMO. (They would build up faster if you stuck in new queens the first week of August.) Come fall feed the 3 big hives and nucs so they have stores for winter.
So you start with 1 big double deep -> split in 3 in June and add queens -> split each of those into about 3 end of July/1st week of August. That gives you 3 first generation splits and up to 9 2nd generation splits. A 12x gainer!
mdasplitter.com is all about splitting and the guy advocating is fairly local to you. Spend an evening there reading. You will get some good ideas.
http://www.bushfarms.com/beessplits.htm#howmanysplits (http://www.bushfarms.com/beessplits.htm#howmanysplits)