On April 21, our hive had four full frames of brood, and I figured it might take them about a week to reach the six frames I needed for an even split.  When the week was up, though, the weather turned windy and rainy, so I didn't get back into the hive until eleven days later...at which point there were a whopping eight frames of brood!

I brushed dead bees out of one of the hives that perished over the winter and filled the brood box up with two frames of pollen, five frames of brood (two of which were halfway honey), and three frames of honey.  I didn't bother brushing any bees into this new brood box because there were scads of workers along for the ride already, especially once I took a whole super of honey (full of more bees) off the top of our healthy hive to add to its daughter hive.

The workers who were out foraging when I messed up their home will all go back to the old hive, and any foragers who I carried to the new hive during the split will probably drift back there as well.  That's no big deal, though, because I included extra honey in the young hive to make up for the lack of foragers.  I also made sure that there's plenty of capped brood in the young hive that will hatch into new foragers within a couple of weeks, so they'll be socking away honey before long.

When doing an even hive split, you don't have to find the queen, so I don't know whether she's still hanging out in the old hive or has moved in with the newcomers in the young hive.  Wherever she's at, that hive will soon be back to normal, gathering nectar and pollen from the big producers that are about to bloom (black locust and tulip-tree).  Meanwhile, the queenless hive will be set back about three weeks as the bees figure out they're queenless (a day or two), earmark a few of the eggs as royalty (one to three days), feed the new princesses royal jelly during their 5 day larval stage, and wait out their eight day pupal stage.  Queenless hives usually hedge their bets by making more than one queen cell, but the queen who emerges from her capping first will systematically kill her competitors.  She soon goes on a mating flight and then starts laying, bringing the hive back into production.

That's assuming all goes well.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that within a month, we'll have two fully active hives instead of one.