Queen Cups

When we were taking the frames of honey to harvest off of Thistle, we found two frames of brood and A LOT of queen cups. None of them seemed to have any eggs in them, but that is probably because these frames were above the bee escape. One of them had some white waxy looking substance in it, I think it may be royal jelly, though it looks a lot more solid than I thought royal jelly would:

I suspect the bees are preparing to swarm - meaning the existing queen is preparing to leave with a large portion of the bees in the hive. They've run out of space and want to find a new home. The bees that remain in the hive would raise a new queen in one of these queen cups.

This would be the perfect time to split the hive. Splitting is essentially me swarming for the bees. Since Thistle feels like it is out of space, I would split it's resources in half and create two hives. Unfortunately I don't have the resources or time to perform a split right now. Though I have been preparing to split Thistle into a new yellow hive, I still don't have an extra bottom board or inner cover - so I have no where for a new hive to go. This means I'll probably end up losing my queen, which is too bad since she is obviously doing an amazing job since her hive is so strong.