My hives that survived this nasty winter in Iowa are just bursting at the seams with bees. I've put a super on each already just to give some more space. My plan was to split this week. We continue to have cold, wet weather almost every day with temps struggling to get to 60 degrees (high of 49 predicted for today). I really want to do it this week since I will be gone for over a week beginning next Monday. My ideal goals are, in order of priority: 1. do splits, by finding frames with eggs/young larva. Basically walk-away splits. 2. Go through the hives, looking for queen cells. If found, put them in nucs. 3) Locate queens and mark if they are unmarked. I will be happy if I can do just the first. Here is my thought if it does not get warm enough to go through frame by frame. I use 3 mediums for for my brood chambers. I'm thinking of just taking the top brood box off and setting it on a bottom board. When I get back in a week to 10 days after moving the boxes, and assuming it's finally warmed up by then, I'd check to see which had the queen and if queen cells are present in any of the hives and proceed accordingly. I realize I wouldn't be finding any swarm cells that may be present already, but I'm not seeing much in the way of other options. Very open to suggestion. Maybe mid-fifties and damp is ok to pull individual frames for inspection, but I'm not comfortable with that.