I checked my 3 hives today and found my strongest one had queen cells on 2 of the frames. There were several frames of capped brood and larvae. I'm not very good at finding the queen. I saw a video where they shook all of the bees into the brood box, added a queen excluder, then put some some brood frames in a box on top. Return 24 hours later and remove the top box, add a queen, resulting in a split.
My questions are these:
1. Could I put the frames with queen cells in the top box and separate it from the bottom box and expect when a queen hatches I will have a viable split?
2. Since I have queen cells on 2 frames, could I potentially put those frames with queen cells in 2 separate boxes with additional frames of brood and honey and have a 3rd hive from the split?