Just saw your PS. Will do just that for now. Getting dark soon.
That might be a good idea. Swap the hives around so that the foragers from the mother hive go into the nuc. This often works really well to bolster a poorly hive, but take care the nuc doesnât get overwhelmed.
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It will help to keep their numbers of foragers and defenders up, they will
enter the Nuc because of the smell of their brood and sisters.
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Small success. Swapped the positions. A few bees actually entered the nuc, but most went into mother hive. Not dark yet. Hope tomorrow morning before work Iâm able to look in and add brood frames.
Should I shake in some bees from another hive or would they kill each other? I could then lock them up and take the nuc box to my brothers place 2km away.
Hi @JeffH. Just suited up and had a look into the nuc. Itâs in a plastic nuc box, so I intend to give it 1 or 2 full brood frames from my strong hive and swap them over into a proper flow hive broodbox using a divider board. The nuc still has plenty of nurse bees and the old rather slow queen. She was just laying too, not sure if successfully. The big supersedure cell is now capped and another in the making. No sign of SHB.
The hive next to it still has the queen in the cage, but almost chewed through and the bees calmed right down.
Thanks for the offer of a phone call. Will take you up on that once I get stuck and not knowing what to decide.
Could bring the nuc to my brothers land, but they have a good amount of SHB, so I almost think I will delay that action. We have 15 acres though, and I could maybe find a place down in the rainforest.
So off into the strong hive broodbox, where Queen Lala resides. They need some frames taken out anyway. They have the flow super and an ideal for honeycomb.
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Hi Rodderick. You mentioned a hive mat for winter on another thread. Wondering if I should put one over the frames in my my weak Nuc.
What can I use? Any carpet material or some fabric in several layers?
Hi, I use a vinyl flooring material that you can buy from Bunnings and sometimes cheaply as offcutts. Stay away from fabrics that the bees legs could become entangled in and just make sure there is a sufficient space around the outsides of the mat so the bees can crawl around and get to the super or Flow frames above. Hope that helps.
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Thanks for the tip about the leg tangling. I saw JeffH uses the mats all year. Didnât know this is good for a bee blanket. Will find a piece in the cellar.
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Last update, as promised:
Checked both nucs 5 days ago, the requeened one had an empty cage, but couldnât find the queen nor brood. Thought maybe they killed the queen.
The other nuc with 2 frames with the old slow walking, slow laying queen still had the supersedure cell capped.
So for the inspection today I had all sorts of strategies swirling in my head, depending on what I would find.
Here is: requeening successful, found a most beautiful âripperâ of a carnie queen walking real fast on her frame, plenty of young uncapped brood in all stages, some starting to get capped. Queen Maya II.
The other nuc only exists because I couldnât kill the queen, and they had made a supersedure cell from one of her very few eggs. I am thinking she has a missing leg, as the reason for her slowness. Found the newly hatched queen (actually, husband did, beek medal earned), walking on the same frame as her mother. Not sure if she was out mating, the weather was rainy and cold. Saw brood, but could have been from mother queen. That nuc only had nurse bees and we were worried about SHB infestation, but didnât even see one. Today saw the first few foragers coming out of that box. They donât have many honey stores left, so will give them a honey comb medium frame from my other strong hive tomorrow. I know, could create some weird comb with a medium frame at the end, but I cringe at the idea of feeding sugar, and thatâs the best honey I have for them. Will clean up the mess when I come back in a few weeks.
I am very happy with the outcome. Made 2 nucs out of one very weak nuc, which was probably weak due to an injured queen.
Phew, close shave. Flying to the US of A Saturday for a few weeks. I am so relieved the nucs are sorted.
Thank you all for your encouragement, warnings, ideas and advice.
Blessings to all your bees.
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Nice job on the hives, very well done. Thank you for the update. Where in the US are you flying to?
Oahu, Maui, Big Island. Medical conference, visit friends, teach. 
Hope you enjoy it! What will you be teaching?
I have never been to Hawaii, but my latest queens come from there. Only had them 2 weeks, we will see how they do. 
Dawn (BM BCh (UK), MRCP (Paeds), BSc, MD (US)⊠etc 
)
Hawaiian queens? 
Teaching martial art, a study in human movement.
Yes, I believe they are from this supplier:
I didnât order them, they came with my nuclei.
I used to be a brown belt in Shorin-Ryu karate over 30 years ago. I learned it to deal with the violence in the area of London that I had to live in at that time. Fortunately, I never had to use it. 
These days I am more of a Tai-Chi mindset, with a little yoga mixed in when I can get my balance right!
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Then the queens are Italians or Carniolans, bred in Hawaii. It sure helps over where you are that they have no African genes.
UCSF High Risk Emergency Medicine 2017. Itâs always interesting. And a tax deductible holiday.
Err, I think the nucleus has definite africanized behavior. I saw the imported (from Hawaii, I mean) marked Italian queen walking peacefully around when we installed the nucleus, but the bees are not calm. Our gardeners are definitely being harassed, so these bees are on notice for removal if they donât settle down soon.
Oh. I suppose itâs not only African genes that can make a nuc aggressive. Maybe they didnât come straight from Hawaii, since you didnât order them personally? Requeen?
Is she Italian or Carnie?
The forum tells me not to just chat with you. Well, it came back to requeening. 
Save the gardeners!
It would not be feasible to send a nucleus from Hawaii - that would probably cost more than a Flow hive!
I am getting some further exact details from the supplier, but my understanding is that he creates a nucleus with frames of local bees from his mature San Diego hives, then introduces a Hawaiian queen. Then he sells them once he is sure that the queen has been accepted. It is quite possible that some of his San Diego hives have partly africanized bees in them. They will take around 6 weeks to die off after the new queen was introduced.
If he introduced her 5 or 6 weeks ago, I will requeen ASAP. Will probably have to move the hive too, the neighbors are not going to be very tolerant of bees like these!
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Thought Iâd revive this nice thread, I miss these OG postersâŠand, @Dawn_SD in all these years this is the first I learned that youâre a brown belt 
! Props 
My husband is also a martial artist, he earned his black belt long ago. After some 15 years on the sidelines he recently returned to class, and out of respect is starting over as a white belt.
Anyway, I too cry out for Help! Requeening 
âŠIâve never done it, and though Iâve had many successions of healthy colonies, 4 of 5 of them are now quite nasty. I ordered four but got three new Carniolan queens that were ordered in from CA by a local supplier. So I chose the three biggest colonies and last Friday I killed those queens. Having read in several places and the supplier also saying 24 hours, I waited til Saturday to put the new ones in (placed at the bottom of a middle frame, vertically, screen out).
Yesterday late afternoon I opened up the first one. Only 10 guards around my face, many lunging at my hand or hive tool, queenless roarâŠpulled up the frame and saw right away that the cage was being mobbed and bitten. Not brushed away easily and came right back. I also saw a nearly finished QC right next to the cage along the bottom of the frame. Looking further there were many more, aka swarm cells. Before placing the queen cage in on Sat I saw and destroyed a handful of apparently dry queen cups, but no developed cells were apparent. This is a very populous deep + medium hive, that I split in mid-March, with lots of honey at this point already, and a decent amount of capped worker and drone broodâŠ
I was thinking to finish looking for queen cells and then put the new one back in, so I took the top box off to look in the bottom. Very bad!!! In seconds I was surrounded by a large cloud of angry bees and had to slap everything back together and swift-walk back to the house. About 8 of them come into the laundry room with me and instead of just going to the windows a few still tried to come after me.
I brought the poor unwanted queen back in with me and put a bit of damp paper towel on the mesh. Miraculously, I didnât get stung, even later on when one came at me and straight into my hair while sitting on the porch around the corner from the back door where she mustâve still been lurking.
So now, Id love to assume that there arenât more QCs in the bottom box and these bees are hopelessly queenless, and will have no choice but to accept this queen. I think Iâll has to go thru those frames too and I plan to try again this afternoon, and still have to look in on the other two replacement queens. I may decide to follow @JeffHâs advice about requeening aggro colonies by getting hold of another queen and separating the boxes.
Wish me luck and let me know your thoughts!
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Hi Eva, Iâm not sure if Iâm too late, however Iâve given some thought on the subject, especially about bees attacking a new queen.
My theory is to take the brood box well away in the same yard for about 24 hours so that the older bees will return to the original site where you could have a new brood box containing a frame of BIAS from a friendly hive.
You could even bounce the old brood box around a bit with the roof off so that more older bees stream out to attack before going back to the old site. Once you are happy that there is only nurse bees remaining, I think that would be a good time to introduce a new queen in her cage.
Because you have mostly cranky hives, a good strategy would be to find someone with friendly hives, or a new location to be able to take the new nuc to, with the hope that the virgin queen will mate with drones from friendly hives. For example: One of my sites has all cranky hives. I wouldnât take a nuc with queen cells to that location for the queen to get mated.
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