Nice to meet you Brian! How are your bees these days?
The bees are doing really well - it's early Spring here and they are building up nicely. I had one hive until last weekend, when I opened it up and split it. The idea is to take apart the hive and re-build it into two hives. One of the halves will have a queen, the other won't. It doesn't take the queenless hive long to figure out the queen is gone, so they will begin making one (they do this by feeding young bee grubs with a higher concentration of a secretion called 'royal jelly' - this causes that grub to become a queen instead of a normal worker). In a few weeks the new queen will be hatched and mated (they make several, and the first to hatch will kill all the others, then go on her mating flight). So the second hive might be a little less strong, but by Summer's end both hives should be strong.