No, I thought you wanted 3 queens to make a weaker split
and not 2 strong hives split. It is not 3 queens per box but only 1 needed; it is not 3 queens per hive. I
should have said to buy 3 queens, one queen for each split hive.
Sorry for the bad wording there!
Besides, dividing the hive into smaller nucs will tame their aggressiveness until the new gentle
queen is laying again. Imagine a nuc so average that not many guard bees could defend their hive.
From my experience that a hive will only turn aggressive, unless africanized, when it is strong enough to do so.
With a weak nuc there isn't many guard bees to do that. They are too busy trying
to keep their broods warm. That is why for the 3 queens and not 2 that you like. Six frames of bees and broods into a nuc hive is fairly strong too depending on how many bees and broods there are. An advantage of a weaker hive is for better queen acceptance versus a stronger hive which has the tendency to reject the new queen. I had to wrap the entire frame to introduce 2 queens into 2 strong hives. Still, one got killed so that they can make their own queens. I don't like it but some August queens would be nice too. If the new queens are not mated then I will recombine into 1 again for the Fall flow if there's any.
So check on the status of this hive to see how strong it is and split accordingly. Does this makes any sense?
Yes, some foragers will return to the original hive. That is why you make this hive a bit weaker by removing more frames of bees from it. The returning foragers will compensate for this weaker hive. Balance is the key for a successful split.