We ended up having a good splitting season. Winter loss was considerable, but the surviving bees came through strong enough to start a lot more hives. We will be safely north fo six hundred colonies this year.

In the images below, I am shaking the bees off three frames of brood and putting them in a third deep box--then we set the third box over an excluder to allow the bees to come up but keep the queen down. Then we can take that third box, give it a new queen and end up with a new hive for the season. This hive had a lot of bees.

This picture is from a hive that I split into four different colonies--it had 12 frames of brood and a ton of bees!

And for the fun picture of the spring--Alex discovered an old plastic queen cup that got turned horizontal, and the bees used it to raise a drone! I like this picture

I hope your splitting went well also!