I have a small swarm WITH a queen- however I am afraid they will not make it through the winter as they are small in size and she is laying accordingly to their size. My thought was to grab a super from another hive and combine the two. The swarm is in a nuc currently, so couldn’t do the newspaper method. Would I cage the queen, then replace a could of the super frames with frames from the nuc and let them all acclimate? Would I move the hives elsewhere or leave where the nuc currently is?
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Hiya and welcome to the Flow forum!
You could actually, but you would still have to decide which queen to keep. It is probably better to decide and dispatch one before you merge than to let the queens fight it out. Too much disruption if they fight. You then just put the 5 frame nuc into a full size box, then put that on top of the newspaper. Two days later, remove the box above the newspaper (they should be through it by then) and pick the best frames from each box to overwinter in the merged hive. The leftovers can be wrapped in cling wrap and frozen for next year.
If you wanted to cage the queen outside the merged hive until you knew that the merge had worked, that might be a good idea. Quite a lot of extra work though, as the caged queen will need attendants, and you will need a week or so to be sure that the remaining queen is laying.
Just my thoughts. I am sure that others will disagree. 
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I agree with Dawn’s suggestion, combine the two colonies by the newspaper method as it the best way to do it. Providing the swarm has some stores to get by till they have merged it is a simple process but if they don’t have stores you could add a frame into the box that the swarm is on.
Cheers
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My thoughts are probably controversial. Oklahoma is still in summer? So probably 4 weeks to go till autumn.
If there is a flow of food the queen could keep laying. You could heavily feed the hive with sugar syrup. That’s 2lbs sugar to one pint water. You could give queen a boost with a small amount of pollen feed as it gets her laying.
You could take a frame of capped brood from another hive within the apiary. And if you have access to friends strong hives take one from them too. Note the word strong please. I have just done this and all is well. I also transferred a few bees too that’s those that didnt shake off.
This way you stand a chance of keeping 2 hives and 2 queens. That’s the upside. You will need to keep feeding!
Down side is it doesn’t work. You get something wrong. You took bad advice! Well that means you still have one hive. If you combine now you will only have 1 hive. And I would rapid feed that combined hive now and put fondant on for the winter.
Nucs are over wintered. Very successfully. You can buy over wintered nucs in spring.
I wish you luck.
I don’t know @TiffanyJ 's climate but as you are in Oklahoma it might be similar to yours. But I do wonder if a strong merged colony will make a better start in the Spring and doing a split then might be a better option. Is your option cost effective to feed the hives leading up to and possibly over Winter?
My climate is totally different so I would like to hear your thoughts.
Cheers
I think the starting New Year with one combined hive is good. But combining at this stage will mean feeding with syrup and then fondant. A big hive is hungry.
But then starting spring with 2 healthy queens and 2 healthy hives I find an attractive option.
I have to disagree with your thinking, yes a big hive consumes more food but each individual bees food needs is the same regardless of being in a small or large colony.
Sorry about this. Having to lay reasoning out in simple terms because the reasoning flows.
During winter the weather is cold more often below 10 c, bees don’t fly, they don’t use much energy so don’t each much. Also it’s a period during which there is no nectar. This continues till about end of February early March.
We expect winter to have consistent weather. Cold wet damp. The bees are not active.
But we get waves of unexpected significant temp increases. Add to that we feed pollen substitute in February. Which gets the queen busy laying. And so the workers are busy so they consume more. These result in feed being consumed rapidly. At a time when no natural nectar exists.
Therefore we feed sugar until it isn’t taken anymore. Then add in a pack of fondant right above the bee cluster.
If there is a spike in the weather the fondant is the reserve. As a side issue it also helps to check if they are in need of feeding because you can see the consumption without opening up the hive during a cold spell. In the area I am winter weather norm is -2 but goes down with wind chill to -15 and maybe lower. In the midlands the norm is less and in Scotland even worse.
I still think it’s a toss up between combine hive now and kill the spare queen or artificially boost a hive.
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It is definitely still summer here- 100 degree days for weeks now. I feel the queen in the nuc is a strong queen, just needs a bit of help. She’s laying, I see new bees emerging, The are forging, but I know definitely not enough to get them through winter. I put in two frames of brood when I put them in the nuc. I really hate the idea of having to feed, but see in this case, either overwintering them in the nuc or combing, they will need fed. I would really like to see her make through the winter- not too many below freezing days here. Would another option be to put them in a medium over winter or just keep them in the nuc?
Hi. Feeding solid fondant is what happens here and it lasts some time particularly in the case of a nuc. but I note in US you use straight sugar from the packet although that was an NY beekeeper.
Feeding syrup from a large feeder keeps the job simple. The U.K. bee inspectors advocate feeding until they stop. But it’s down to your equipment.
If you think you can fill your nuc hive with brood then put it into a full size brood box. Use blank board at each end to reduce workload for bees but be prepared to exchange for drawn frames if need be.
The remaining frames you add to the existing nuc frames need to be drawn. Now I use drawn frames from within my apiary so I would use frames drawn from my other hives.
As long as you queen has a flow of food and pollen she will lay. If she detects food supply dropping off she responds with a drop off in laying.
When you inspect the frames in the nuc you should see brood, stores and pollen. If little or no pollen then give the hive a pollen substitute.
I think based on how you have described you active queen and also your climate, that your nuc will prosper.
Good luck
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If you have enough time before the weather turns too cold then by all means transfer the nuc into a brood box and see how it goes. Maybe you have a couple of months for the colony to build up. As I have said I don’t know your climate so maybe seek out a local bee group for their advice is a good option.
If there is enough time for the colony to build up and get enough stores to help carry them well into winter it could be worth thinking about.
@MrTF Obviously climatic conditions will change the amount of food a colony needs, but I feel you have missed my point Tony. Do you not feel that a bee in a colony will have the same need for food regardless of the size of the colony it is in? Of course a large colony will consume more than a small colony, I agree with that. But a big hive will only consume proportionately more food in the same conditions depending on the number of bees…
My thinking of course is what I would do and my priority would be to get the colony thru Winter in the strongest condition possible and split it in the Spring.
Interesting reading about your climate in Oxfordshire, it is so very different to my sub tropical climate here where it doesn’t get under 23C in ‘Winter’ and the bees forage all of the year.
Cheers
Hi all,
I caught a swarm on 27th Sept. I literally drove through the swarm on my way home and went back with a box and collected them. Since then, I transferred them into a 5 frame nuc, then today into an 8 frame brood box. It’s here I noticed the hive is queenless and there’s a laying worker - the queen was probably squished on my windscreen when I drove through the swarm 
I have another hive which, to cut a long story short, has two ideals (marginally bigger than shallow boxes) as brood boxes. Friends built this beautiful hive for me out of hardwood (heavy) and said, they only use ideals, even as brood boxes, and suggested I try it as it’s not as heavy etc etc. I did this and while I get where they’re coming from, it’s way too annoying with splitting etc, when all my other brood boxes are deeps and inspections take longer. The bees are also inclined to join the frames vertically with comb, which I’ve already cleaned up (causing much destruction and mayhem) twice.
I’d like to kill two birds with one stone here and merge the two hives and am seeking some guidance in a kind of 20 questions way.
Can I:
- using the newspaper method join the two hives by putting the full deep queenless hive on top of a brood box that is two ideals?
- do this even though the hives are 30m apart?
- put a feeder above the queenless hive box during the merger to keep them going?
- assuming a successful merge, then reverse the boxes to get the full deep on the bottom and the ideals above? Not 100% sure how to then get a QX back into the equation after this either?
There is a young queen in the hive with ideals. I’m not really familiar with this type of situation, but would the laying worker try and knock off the young queen? I haven’t clapped eyes on her 
yet (inspecting the hive before the merger) but I’m assuming she might be smallish?
Thanks for any feedback or thoughts
I would say yes, you can newspaper merge them, but I would deal with the laying workers first, or they may try to kill the real queen. That is because a hive with laying workers “thinks” that it has a queen due to the pheromones from the laying workers. I would sort out the laying workers by shaking all off the bees off about 30 or 40 meters away from the hive. The non-laying bees will return to the original hive location, and the laying workers tend not to make it home. I know that @JeffH has done something like this with good success.
If you have a frame of worker brood which has a lot of uncapped larvae, it would be good to add that for a few days before the merge. The brood pheromone from uncapped larvae helps to stop workers from developing their ovarioles, interrupting the production of more laying workers.
There shouldn’t be an issue on the 30 meter distance, if you remove all boxes etc from the queenless hive site while they merge. If you use a double layer of newspaper, it will take them a couple of days to chew through it. This is enough time to make most of them re-orient when they exit from the new hive entrance. You may have a few lost bees for a couple of days, but they will look for the nearest hive that smells like home.
Putting the feeder above the queenless box is a great idea.
You can definitely switch the box positions a week or so after the merge. If you don’t want both boxes for brood, just find the queen, make sure she is in the lower box, put the queen excluder on top, then the ideal above the QX. If there is drone brood in the ideal, you will need to provide an upper exit for drones for about 3 weeks, because they won’t make it through the QX and will die trying.
I am sure that @JeffH and others will have more ideas for you. 
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I’m assuming this is because they are too heavy to fly with their developed ovarioles, is that why?
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I don’t think anyone really knows. That is a common explanation, but some people also think that laying workers don’t leave the hive for “cleansing flights”, same as the queen doesn’t - house bees carry her trash out. So after a week or two, they have forgotten where they live, and can’t make it home, especially as they are heavier than the average worker.
I don’t know the real truth, but it just goes to show that bees are fascinating. The method often (but not always) works, so it is worth a try.
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That was my next guess 
What I’m still curious about is, will laying workers revert back to regular workers with long-enough exposure to the queen & brood pheromone of a healthy hive? I was wondering because I’ve done several combinations successfully, but none of the populations had laying workers. In fact, I haven’t dealt with that problem at all so far. I would be interested to know if laying workers can be ‘rehabilitated’ by doing some time separated by a mesh screen over a queen-right colony 
…if anyone knows!
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I think that @Michael_Bush may have something to say about this. I believe that his “Panacea” concept of a frame of brood is grounded in this concept. Hopefully he will respond to my tag…
First, all the laying workers know their way home which is why shaking them out almost always fails. In a serious laying worker situation half the workers are laying. Three weeks of exposure to brood pheromones reverts the process.
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I’m not sure where I’d be without all your input.
It is greatly appreciated!
I just saw a youtube video from the guy from Uni of Guelph, who pretty much did as Dawn described and mentioned shaking the bees out as an option.
Decisions decisions…
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Hi @Outbeck & thank you @Dawn_SD for tagging me. I was led to believe that laying workers have never done orientation flights, which is why they can’t find their way home - apparently.
It worked for me the first time I tried it. However it didn’t work the second time. I put that down to the laying worker/s following the rest of the bees back. The third time I tried it a bit further away & it worked. My strategy now would be to go further away if I was going to use that strategy again.
This is another strategy which hasn’t failed me yet & it’s one that I frequently use if a frame of brood doesn’t work first (a frame of brood was worked every time so far this season).
The second strategy requires a second queen-rite colony of similar strength, or even stronger in the same yard, separated by a good distance. The first thing is to remove all the frames containing drone larvae, (which is not really part of the strategy) & replace them with a frame containing eggs & young larvae. Some emerging bees would also help. All you do after that is swap the two hives position. Gradually the bees from the queen-rite colony will populate the laying worker hive & vise versa. The influx of bees from the queen rite hive will dominate, & therefore influence the colony into producing emergency queens.
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