I have one hive that has been doing so well this year, fast buildup, low mites, putting on a lot of honey. When I was doing splits this spring I made sure get some daughters from this queen, Queen Guinevere. This is the same hive that was looking a little odd in April, and I'm pretty sure that they just swarmed without my knowing it because they haven't had any issues since, but because of the timing of that swarm, I didn't get to split them until May.
The split showed brood from a new queen after a couple weeks, but I think the queen must have come back from her mating flight injured or something because there was very little brood, the bees had more queen cells drawn out, and I didn't see a queen. I left them to raise another queen and checked on them yesterday to see if they had been successful. They hadn't been as there was no brood, very few bees in the hive, and the place was overrun with beetle larvae. It was too much of a mess to salvage for so few bees, so I shook them out and cleaned up the mess.
I also had an older queen quit laying on me a couple weeks ago. I was never very happy with her, so I put a frame of Guinevere's eggs in the hive so they could raise a queen from her instead. I was planning on just removing all queen cells that were on any other frames but that one, but I had the timing off and when I went in to do QC reduction there was a already a hatched queen cell on Guin's frame and on a frame from the old queen, which means I have no idea if the virgin queen in there is a daughter of Guinevere's or not. (That thread of yes2matt's that was about QC timing was helpful in me realizing that they must have used older larvae and thrown of my days as a result, so lesson learned there.)
This leaves me in an odd pickle. I really want to make sure I have some daughters of this queen going forward, and I'm nervous about going into winter with just Guinevere, since if something happens to her I'll lose out on her genes. It's already July though, and I'm not sure it's a good idea to split her hive this late. What do you guys think? Is it safer to split, or not to split?