Our main hive looks like it had a queen after a split, but now she’s gone. There’s some brood on both sides of one frame, but there are no eggs or larvae. That brood is in a good pattern and is unlikely to be workers laying.
We have a swarm we caught a few blocks away. It’s in a nuc right next to the above hive, it has a queen and is going well. Larvae, brood, etc etc
We’re going to give it another week for eggs to appear, but it looks like we’ll have to combine the nuc with the hive to make the hive queen right.
Using the newspaper method, (please correct me if I’m wrong) we’d put the nuc frames into a new brood box, put it on top of the hive with newspaper between them, then the QE, then the super.
My question is, I only want to have one brood box and one super. How do I remove the extra brood box? I assume the queen could be laying in either/both of them.
What do you think about putting another QX between brood boxes where newspaper goes? After colonies combine, remove bottom box, shake everyone from it to top box, add frames from bottom to top, do something with extra frames left
Another question. Why do you want to put super on top of a smaller colony (nuc)?
Thanks for the reply ABB.
That sounds like a good plan.
What I’m trying to achieve is combining the nuc with the queenless hive. Once the two are combined, it’ll have quite a good population, so will hopefully be a strong colony, and it being spring keep the super on top.
Cheers
Ron
Before you do a unite you should make certain the the original hive is queenless. Lack of eggs may simply mean the queen has gone off lay or you may have a bad queen there. Uniting such hives may result in the death of the queen that you wish to keep.
Do this by adding a frame with eggs to the hive and checking 4/5 days later. You will have queen cells being built if the hive is queenless.
