Is it swarming! Please help to identify

[Kathyp]

depends on how many have brood and eggs.  you'll want to give a slight majority of the eggs to the hive that will make a new queen.  you will move the old queen to the new hive, so they can do with less brood.  you will also want to split the food between them.  if the hive is short of food, give the queenless hive the feed and feed the hive with the old queen.

when you are done you should have:

a new hive with the old queen
a new box (ASAP) added to the hive with the old queen.

the queen cells in the old hive
the old hive with plenty of eggs/tiny larvae and food


some of the bees from the new hive with the old queen, may drift back to the old hive with the eggs and queen cells.  that's ok.

make sense?

others will add if i missed anything.

[sc-bee]

I see in the photo you are running two deeps. Split the deeps and divide the resources. As stated add extra space to both. Even split with brood boxes.

Someone else may advise a different configuration if you are trying for some honey this year . A swarm or split in my neck of the woods means no honey that year. Not sure for your location.

[Irina]

Just an update...
I could not find the old queen. I was sure she was there 3 weeks ago; she was marked. Is it possible that she already swarmed with the bees and I missed that???
However the hive has incredible amount of bees, brood, approximately 8 queen cells and storage.
I decided to split them anyway. I tried to divide everything as equal as possible, and placed new colony as far as I can.
Is it possible that they will go back to the old hive?

I also added extra space for both of them.

Thank for your advices.
Irina

[Kathyp]

some will drift back.  as long as you gave both plenty of brood in all stages, you should be ok.  if you find that there is to much drift, just swap the box positions.  recheck the hives in a couple of weeks or so, you should be able to tell where the queen is, if she's still there.  if you don't find eggs in either, don't panic.
since you found queen cells, it is possible that one already hatched out and the old queen was killed.  just keep an eye on them so that you are sure that both end up with laying queens.