Beekeeping. How I split my hive 4 times. Frame by frame.

[waynerose]

Your process is right on. Only issue I saw was turning frame upside down. You don't know the age of larva in queen cell. Turning it upside down could damage the queen. Commercial bee Keeper.

[honeyhobbits]

Thank you for Sharing. That is one packed outbox of bees! I think you did the right thing splitting them. One thing I wanted to mention is that the queen cells you were seeing in the middle of the frames are most likely not superseder cells they are all swarm cells. The time of year and the status of the hive more so determine what they are making queen cells for not necessarily the location of the cell on the frame. This hive has all of the signs of swarm preparation. The sings I see are: you can tell the honey flow is on, you have drones in the box, there is no place left for the queen to lay, she is laying very well.
Like you said I am surprised the queen had not swarmed out yet! She will usually leave once the first cell is capped. So good job catching this one before she left because that is a steller queen!
Here is what I would have suggested you do for this hive. Once you found the first swarm cells change your attention to finding the queen. Once you find her take her and two or three frames with Capped brood not open brood, honey/nectar, and pollen on them and put in a five frame nuc box with two empty frames.
Then the simplest thing to do would be to close everything up and walk away. You just bought yourself almost a month that you do not need to worry about swarming from the original hive, and all of those bees will switch from gathering food for brood and concentrate on gathering honey! The first virgin queen to hatch out will kill most or all of the other virgin queens and then if all goes well she will fly out (hopefully not get eaten by a dragonfly or a bird or any other living thing that likes insects), get matted by a bunch of drones and come back as the new queen of the hive.
Once the nuc box has filled out the two frames and has bees covering all five frames you can put it in a full-size hive box or you could sell it!
Or you can do exactly what you did and split the hive many times, put as many cells in as many boxes as you have and see how many new queens you can get! My suggested way is just one of many like Kevim C said there are so many ways to handle these situations with bees. The main thing is to enjoy watching the colonies brow and not be afraid of queen cells, all queen cells are a good thing, they are an opportunity to grow the population or replace a bad queen. I love seeing queen cells in my hives, I just think they are the coolest looking things.

[skywave]

Yup. I am in Central California. 1 more month to worry about swarm cells. Otherwise they are done for the Year.

[kevimc]

interesting; I would have taken the queen, eggs and food frames to a new hive and hoped for honey out of the original but hey thats what makes beekeeping so facinating; like growing a business; there are many ways not all right but not all wrong; you just try and work with the bees; you hope you are a good leader; and the successes and failures educate us; in this case you gained more hives; probably your goal; all the best