Hey thanks Jeff!
I’ll see if I’ve got the brood frames to attempt option 2. Most of it is the wrong size (ideal).
What distance do you think I should go to shake out the bees? Also, can I do the merger on the same day (today) if I give them some time to get back or wait? (I don’t really need this weakening grumpy colony). The next fine day is Wednesday, but I might be able to do the merger tomorrow between showers.
Many thanks!
You can use ideals in full depth supers, you’ll just need to remove any comb below the bottom bar when you want to put it back into an ideal super.
If you are going to rectify the laying worker, that will take a few days to find out if what you did worked or not. As far as the first option goes, I’m thinking 50-100 meters away & ideally behind trees or buildings, that is if my theory about the laying worker/s is correct.
Option two will also take a few days to get a positive result because you wont know if the strategy worked until you start to see emergency queens developing, which can take up to 4 days.
In the mean time you can donate some nurse bees to the weak hive using the method I showed a couple of weeks ago in this thread:
cheers
Thanks again Jeff!
Not long after I posted, I realised it would be a bit hard to tell if shaking the bees out worked if I went and merged them straight away 
I love your nurse bee transfer! There wasn’t any grief inside the hive?
I think I’ve seen nurse bees shaken out in front of a hive on the ground with a similar (perhaps slightly slower) result than yours.
Hi Beck, it could be the same video that I watched, that was shared by @Semaphore . The nurse bees will be readily accepted, with an added bonus of them being so young, which means they still have most of their life ahead of them to be a great help to the weaker hive, in order to get it back on track.
Just an update.
I dumped the bees well over 100m from the hive with lots of trees in between.
The angry foragers returned. I left them for a number of days then checked.
I couldn’t see any eggs but am reluctant to rely on my eyesight as I rarely see them anyway.
I had a small magnifying glass this time, but still wouldn’t be 100% sure.
I went ahead with the merger and kept the top box well stocked with sugar syrup (see pic below).
It seemed to go well and I had a quick inspection yesterday as I removed the newspaper, feeder and reversed the boxes.
Again I didn’t see any eggs, but not unusual. There were a handful of angry bees, but overall a much calmer bunch. I’ll look again in ten days or so and see how they’re going, but so far so good 
