I've not done any experimenting with honey bee hives but I have been doing a few experiments with my native stingless bees to make small healthy nuc's which have been very successful.
Normally nuc's for stingless bees aren't made and hives are split in half to create two hives which can also cause problems for a short time while the hives are rebuilding, you also have to wait a long time before you can split again making it hard to produce many new hives, I also have to make each hive box by hand which also would limit how many splits I could do.
I knew some keepers use bamboo to make stingless bee hives so I cut myself a few stalks of bamboo and cut each one just the right size to fit a small nuc colony of bees and allowed the bamboo to dry after I cut each in half and added some honey pots and pollen to each one, I added brood from two hives in each nuc only taking a small amount of brood from both hives, one part of brood with a queen cell and workers cells but no bees and the other with worker cells and adult bees, I'd then glue the two parts of bamboo together with propolis.
I set up my bamboo nuc's in different locations and waited to see how they'd fair, to my surprise all my nuc's survived and progressed very quickly, meanwhile the parent hives also remain strong and rebuild much quicker allowing me to make more then enough nuc's.
I choose two related hives when taking sets of brood and only add the queen before she hatches as Australian native bees do not accept a new queen even if their queenless and have no way to make their own, however they will accept brood.