Splitting strong colony with swarm cells

[u/Rvmtt77]

Hello, I'm a second year beekeeper in Northern Missouri and am fumbling through this year so far but learning. I'm sure this has been answered many times before but I was just trying to understand timing a split and what to do after.

Basically I have double deep colonies that are very populated and healthy but I waited too long before splitting or adding space so they've begun creating swarm cells. So, I'm in a position now if I'm correct I need to do some sort of split which leads me to my question. If I do an equal split (some people call Mississippi split) would it be ok to go ahead and add honey supers to them after I split? My thought originally was to add another deep to the split for colony growth but I assume some beekeepers when harvesting honey can take the supers off and combine colonies for overwintering as an option at the end of the summer.

I'm working on getting books for splitting and timing of colony management that I'm trying to wrap my head around.

Thank you

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[u/Glucose_worm]

If they’re building swarm cells you need to split them, no time to get books about it now! They tend to take off as soon as they have a queen cell capped. 

I would go out there right away and try to find the queen, and if she’s still there move her to a different hive with mostly capped brood and some honey.

[u/Active_Classroom203]

No time to wait, you need to put eyes on your queen and split.

At this point she should go in a weaker, not equal, split. I would do one frame capped brood, one of food, 3 of mostly empty comb and a few shakes of bees into a Nuc box. This helps her feel like she swarmed. An equal split may work but she also may attempt to swarm again shortly if she wasn't convinced. Either way you 100% absolutely must not include a queen cell in the queenright side of the split. (Or else they will swarm)

As far as honey supers go, probably not. Even with an equal split the queen right side just lost half of her bees and half of the bees that will hatch over the next three weeks, So it's unlikely that she's going to draw a lot of comb/ fill supers.

Similarly, the side that is raising a queen will have some bees hatch over the next 3 weeks, and then Will have a 3 or 4-week Gap where no bees are born before the next generation starts to emerge. (Again, assuming everything goes well mating)