I am in my first year of keeping bees and read this forum every day. It has been very helpful.
Until recently everything was going well. I have three hives (started from packages in late April of this year) that have been growing quite well. As of a week or so ago all three had filled a second 10-frame deep box. Here is where the trouble started. I got a little greedy and on Sunday I pulled three frames from two of the hives to make two nucs. So, each nuc consisted of 1 frame with lots of eggs, 1 frame with lots of capped brood, and one frame of mostly capped food. I added one empty frame and a division board feeder to each nuc. I felt the large hives were strong enough to recover from this before winter.
All looked good, except I think I pulled the queens from both of the source hives, as the nucs did not have queen cells three days later and the source hives a covered with dozens of emergency queen cells. I think the source hive will recover the loss of the queens, so I am not too concerned about this. Upon inspection the source hives were at least 85-90% built out in both boxes, so I decided it was time to stop feeding 1:1 syrup and add honey supers. Now the source bees are cut off and they are robbing the nucs blind. The nucs are only about 50 feet away and there is a lot of traffic between them. I have reduced the nuc entrances to just about 1/2" but they are still robbing. I am worried if I stop filling the division board feeders in the nucs than the bees from the source hives will just continue robbing the stored food in the nucs (which they are probably already doing).
To sum it all up, I now have bees filling the honey supers with syrup they are robbing from the new nucs. Any ideas on how to correct the situation, other than going back in time and not pulling the frames in the first place?