>>when there are 12+ frames of brood, killing even a few hundred bees is down in the noise.

Right.  It seemed rolling or squashing a queen was not a big concern although definitely a possibility when shoving frames back into the boxes.

>>...conversely, it makes me wonder why we often see the pictures (and hives) we do see that are "dripping" with bees during the daytime...what are all those bees doing?

The good books say most of a colony's bees are one sort or another of a house bee.  [One learns to read everything with a grain of salt...]  Only a small % does the foraging according to them.  Capped brood especially hardly needs covering bees other than regulating the temperature.  It occured to me that bees in the desert Southwest behave somewhat differently that the bees in the Northeast. 

The amount of brood in Dee's hives did seem very impressive.  A hive could not raise that much brood without sufficient bees to control temp & humidity.

>>the splits were almost all full box splits, without finding the queen.

So Dee does not care much if the laying queen is in the split or the parent hive?

Waldemar
 

****************************************************
* General Information About BEE-L is available at: *
* http://www.honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/default.htm   *
****************************************************