prevented swarm by splitting, but did I do it correct?????

[ctbeeguy]

I am new to beekeeping (going on my second year) and had a pretty successful first year.  My bees grew by leaps and bounds last summer and made it through the winter as strong as I think they could have (btw, I am in CT).  This past month I checked a couple of times and noticed swarm cells so after talking to another beekeeper we decided to split the hive, which we did this past Saturday.  The original hive had two deeps under two honey supers and we split it into 1 deep and 1 honey super each.  Here is my biggest concern:  the bees were very aggressive and agitated by the time we got everything set up, and I couldn't find the queen, so I really don't know for sure whether the queen is in the correct hive.  One hive has no swarm cells (where the queen is supposed to be) and one has around a dozen in varying stages. The one without the swarm cells is buzzing with plenty of activity.  The bees are coming and going and hanging by the entrance.  The other has very little activity, but there are plenty of bees in there.  Should I open back up and look for the queen, or do something else?

[hardwood]

If you can't find the queen she may already have swarmed and you didn't notice. Make sure there are queen cells in both.

Scott

[FRAMEshift]

When you do a split like this, you want swarm cells in each hive.  You don't know where the queen is, so you want the swarm cells as insurance to make sure all hives can make a new queen if they need to.

Is your busy hive in the same location as the original hive?  Sounds like all the foragers came back to that location and the other hive has no activity coming and going because it has no foragers.  That's ok.  You have a full deep of bees in there and they will "promote" some bees to forager status in the next day or two.  But you need to move a frame with swarm cells into the hive that has none.

As a general rule I think that, if you have the resources to do it, splits should be made with no concern for the location of the queen.

[Brian D. Bray]

For future reference:
It's okay to do a split like that and it doesn't really matter which hive has the queen.  Just be sure that each hive has either queen cells or fresh eggs from which the bees can rear a queen. 

When doing a split of this type place the 2 hives facing each other about 3 feet apart on each of the original hive location.  That way the returning foragers much choose which new hive to go into and the division of foragers will be more evenly split between the 2 hives.  After a few days rotate the hives so they face south or south east, them after a few more days move them to their final locations.  The forager bees will search out the hive to return to with each move, as long as the move is less than 100 ft but shorter is better.   Better to make 2 moves of 50 feet than 1 move of 100 feet.