When I make a split it is because they are about to swarm . What I'm doing is artificially swarming them by removing the old queen and just enough brood to give her a head start ( usually two frames of brood and two frames of honey , or feed them ) . I locate the frames that have queen cells started and carefully place them in a spare hive body so they won't get smashed or shaken , I then take frames with bees on them and shake the bees into the hive with the old queen ( I try to get about a third of the bees with the old queen , this leaves enough bees with the new queen to keep them in good shape until she makes her maiden flight) then I put the top on them and move them at least a mile away so the foragers return to that hive and not the origanel . The frames with the queen cells should be placed back into the old hive as soon as the other hive is shut up , be sure to be easy and not smash the queen cells . If the new queens are very close to comming out of their cells and the old queen has not left yet the workers that were going to go with the swarm will probably tank up on honey so you will not have to place very much honey with them and you may not have to move the old queen very far , just watch them to see if any try to go back to the old hive . I have split strong hives that wasn't going to swarm by taking a frame with queen cells from one that was , just gently sweep the bees off back into their hive and use bees from the hive that you want to split , you will have to move the split some distance away ( if you know of other beekeepers around and they will let you set it up close to the it will give you a good drone supply for the new queen), be sure you get enough bees and honey in the new hive and a frame or two with plenty of pollen . You can also cut a queen cell from a frame but it takes practice , you have to. Keep them warm and don't shake them or turn them over ( sometimes the new queen will shift in the cell and it will kill her or deforme her ) . I have had new queens emerge from their cells while I was working the hive , I got three new queens at one time this way , the bees were confused by the smoke and did not kill them as they came out ( sometimes the workers will keep a new queen in their cells for a couple of days , this may have been what was going on with the hive at the time) . I made up some five frame hives and put a frame with brood and bees and a frame of honey with them, they made it and I used one of the queens in a hive that had an old queen that was not laying enough eggs to keep the hive going. That year I was up to eighteen hives then we had two bad winters in a row and the droughts here in Oklahoma and I lost most of them ( lost my biggest hives in one winter storm when we had below zero temps and fifty mile an hour winds , the honey over clusters condensed moister and the bees froze ). I started this year with seven hives then lost one when we had a bad storm , the winds were over sixty miles an hour and blew the top off a hive and they drowned in the heavy rain, now with the split I'm back to seven hives. The eighteen hives was hard to keep up with and have a full time job .
I raise my own queens and some of mine are a little meaner than most ( might just be the ones the horses knocked over a few times that are the mean ones) , even gentle bees like to sting me for some reason).
If your bees swarm and the bees gather on a tree a good way to catch the swarm is a frame with a little brood in it placed in a five gallon bucket , just hold the bucket on the bottom of the swarm and they will go to it to keep the brood warm then you place the frame in a hive and your good to go .
I do clip my queens wings , but my brothers don't , they put out swarm catch boxes with a little bit of comb in them and hope a swarm goes in.
As you work the bees you will learn a lot that isn't in the books , one thing a lot of books fail to mention is that some queens sing ( they make what I call a piping sound by vibrating their wings) and it almost like a hen when she sings before or after she lays an egg , hard to discribe but you'll know it when you hear it and if you have one that sings its a lot easer to locate here .
Hope you get some use from this , any other questions you might have I'll try to answer, good luck with the bees .
