Best Time for Spring Split?

[Beeboy01]

I've been planning some splits for my bee yard and am wondering when would be the best time to start. I'm only planning to increase my yard by one or two hives and want to pull the brood and bees out of my three hives and let the splits make their own queen. I have been feeding my hives to build them up for spring and to get them ready for the season and they are all going strong.
   I was going to wait till the hives start drone production before splitting them.  Would this be the best time for an early split or should I wait for queen cells to appear. I don't want the hives to get into swarming mode which is usually indicated by the appearance of queen cells which is why I was going to use drone production as an indicator for splitting.

[bwallace23350]

I have the exact same question. I have one have and one died. Cleaned out the dead box yesterday. My other hive is very strong and healthy with lots and lots of activity right now. So when should I split it?

[gww]

First let me say that I am first year.  I read a resopnce the other day that said one guy waits till the ground temp is a constant 50 degrees.  That is about mushroom season around here.  Others say when you have lots of drone maturing.  The white eyed stage or some color eye stage of the drone puts them old enough.  Lots of bee keeping timeing seems to be around the apple bloom.

I am in the same boat and am figuring for me in zone 5B to do it some time around the middle of april depending on bee density.  I was with a guy one time that made a split around this time and my first two swarms I caught last year was on may 6/7th and so I am guessing that would be to late if using the split to hold down swarming.  I am too new to know anything.
Good luck
gww

[BeeMaster2]

Beeboy,
If you have drones flying, which I suspect, you can make splits. Rule of thumb is if you have purple eyed drones you can make splits. I do not see any drones coming out of my hives nor in my observation hive but other beeks in the club are seeing them. Around here, Valentine's Day is when you can start making queens.
Jim

[sterling]

Letting the splits make the queens is probably not the best way to get good queens. You might be better off to pull the queen and a couple frames of brood out of a strong hive and let the strong hive make the cells then use the cells to make nucs of what ever size you want.
A better idea is buy laying queens.

[Beeboy01]

No drones flying yet so I'm going to wait, still need to get some more equipment together anyways.
Sterling, I prefer to raise and use my own queens, never have had a lot of luck with buying them even locally. There seems to be a lot of inconsistency in the quality of nucs and queens in my area. 

[Barhopper]

Made my 6th split today. Also found laying queens on my first split and one that lost their queen. Your weather isn't much different than mine. I would suggest moving the queen to a nuc and letting the strong side of the split make the queen.

[Beeboy01]

Just did a quick hive inspection today and found drone brood but none were hatched out yet. I'm going to wait another week before splitting, just want to be sure all the ducks are in a row.
  Spotted plenty of brood in the hives so I'm hoping this will be pretty easy.

[GSF]

Beeboy, Sterling brought up a good point about raising queens. If I were to do it I would do just what he said. The reason being is because a full hive can provide the best daycare center possible. There's more house bees to feed her, groom her, and tell her how pretty she is(lol) There's more resources because of more bees foraging and more house bees. Now compare that picture to 2 or 3 frames of bees. I'm not saying that doing anything less will create a bad queen, but why not stack the deck in her favor?

[Beeboy01]

I usually take the main hive and queen and move it away from the original location in the yard and put the split in it's place. That way the field bees return to the split and keep it strong while it makes a replacement queen. Every week or so I move another frame of brood taken from one of the other hives in the yard over to the split to keep the numbers up, it also helps with swarm control in the donor hive. If there are no queens produced after about six weeks I'll bit the bullet and buy a queen locally. I have found that splitting using a full deep gives better results than just a 5 frame nuc which is a little different than the norm.
  I'm not interested in a major expansion for my hives, just want to increase by one or two this year.