Great advice. I don't know about officially raising queens. It looks complicated and more effort than I have time for. Who knows?
**update, see pics**
Anyway, here's a quick update....So I stepped outside 2 days ago and noticed a swarm balling up in a nearby tree. I quickly grabbed it and shook into a deep box w/ queen excluder, brought it back to bee yard to figure out what to do. I couldn't tell which hive it came from and weather's been rainy so I didn't want to open everything up to inspect. While assessing, I noticed one of my split hives was looking weird....tons of bees outside and fanning...not really bearding/washboarding looking: so I opened it up.
[reminder, this was a split I made from the original posting. I made 8 queenless splits, each with a bunch of queen cells.]
Immediately, I found an unmarked queen walking around. I thought: awesome, it must have hatched recently. As I went to get a clip to mark her, I found another, and another, and another. I started noticing the cut open circles of many of the cups. I quickly made some make-shift cages and maxed out my queen clips. Even on frames that I checked and put in a different box, I found more queens over the next 60 minutes as they must have just been hatching out. Long story short, I caged 9 queens, found 1 dead one, and there were still several more capped queen cells. I put them back in over night to give me time to figure out what to do.
I made two boxes of 2-frame mating nucs w/ scrap plywood in my garage. They aren't pretty, they aren't airtight, but they'll do for now.
Next day, I opened it back up to find 7 queens still alive (2 died over night), and one more fresh, soft, wobbly queen walking around free. I was able to get 6 queens into transfer cages and sold them to a local for $10/each and then placed 2 queens (marked) in the mating nucs w/ frames of brood. I imagine there are a dozen more queens in the remaining 7 split boxes, but weather's been bad and I haven't been able to get into them.
surfer349,
With that number of bee hives you are ready to move on to making your own queen. You may want to buy or build some nucs. I see you have a plastic nuc already.
Ruthie, who posts on here posted a link from her web site to a great seminar/class that she probably set up. Dr. Sean Kenny gave the class and it was one day. She broke it up into 11 parts. If you just go through part 1 to part 6 you will have all the skills and confidence to try your hand at making your own queens. If not, there are still other ways that you can do that. By the way there are other ways to get where you want to go. Also you need to find another space to keep your bees, you've out grown that space. I keep mine at or near cattle growers pastures or hay fields. I'm on a borrowed computer so I can't link you directly.
Go to youtube. Hampton Roads Beekeepers. Backyard Queen Rearing. She just posted it this year. I'm not very fast at hand writing so I paused often and wrote down his whole power point presentation.
If that seems beyond you just look at the queen rearing section here for this year and you may get all the help you need.
Good Luck