Attempting to Make Splits

We've got big plans for our four honeybee hives.  Here it is April 16th and we're almost out of honey.  We pulled honey in July and again in the fall and our inventory is low.  I think we'll run out before we rob the hives.  So we got to thinking that we need a few more hives. If we had 6 hives instead of four, that would be perfect.

I do have swarm traps out to try to catch some wild swarms, but so far, no luck.  The other option is to make splits.  That's exactly what we did.  You'll notice the splits below.  Moving left to right, the third box and the last box are splits.  The splits come off of the existing four hives, and I'll try to explain what we did.

A quick description of making a split is as follows:  You get an empty box.  Then you open a healthy hive of bees with a strong population.  As you go through each frame in the brood chamber, you want to locate the queen.  On frames where the queen is NOT there, remove a frame of honey, a frame of pollen, a frame of eggs, a frame of uncapped and capped larva and put it in the empty box.  We attempted a split into a deep box and another split in the Nuc.

Within five hours, the nurse bees in the split hives realize that there is NO queen in the box by the lack of the scent of her pheromone.  That spells doom for a colony of bees, so they pick out a cell for the bee in which they'll make a queen.  To accomplish this, the nurse bees begin feeding it nothing but royal jelly that they produce from a gland in their heads.  I'll show a projected timeline below:

We made splits on April 6th, 

On April 9th the bees select the larvae that will become the queen cells
On April 11th, they cap the queen cells

On April 19th the queen hatches and leaves her cell
From April 22-April 26, the virgin queen takes orientation flights
From April 24-May 3 the queen takes her mating flight where she flies to meet a drone to get bred.
On April 26-May 3 you'll see your first eggs if mating was successful
By May 12, you'll want to investigate to ensure they've been successful in creating a new queen.

Here is the split hive that we put in a regular deep box:

And here's one that we put in a nuc.:

If the splits were successful, we should see a queen in the split hives as well as eggs by May 12.  We use bricks positioned on the top cover to tell the story about what's going on in the hive.  A brick laid longways tells us that we either saw the queen or we saw eggs.  A brick laid crossways, like the third and last hives tells you that no queen was located and no eggs were located.

If the splits were successful, we'll know about it and will be able to move the bricks on the 3rd and 6th hives longways.  We certainly hope we're successful in splitting and moving from four to six hives of honeybees.