I have one queenless hive in two medium boxes and want to combine with one of my nucs. The nuc is in two medium 5 frame boxes.
Do I just put the 10 nuc frames in one medium and put the two queenless mediums on top with newspaper in between?
Thanks, Ray
you got the ideas, instead of using newspaper, spray top bars and any bees around them on the queenright hive with sugar syrup and do the same to the bottom bars and bees on the queenless super. the queen lees super has no queen pheromone so there should be little or no squabbling between them when you combine. the queenless super will probably get excited with the queen pheromone and probably fan the scent through the super to let everyone know they have a queen again.
If you smoke them well and they are two weak hives (and not strong booming hives) they usually combine ok without the newspaper. But the newspaper is the standard method and is pretty reliable.
I tried to combine using this no newspaper method, because I had the same type hives that rayb had and I'm feeding both hives. It was awful. 1000's of bees dead, dying, fighting. This is not a good idea. I sprayed everything, even had lemongrass in the sugar water. Terrible, I'll never do it again. Now instead of two weak hives, one being queenless, I have one very weak hive with a queen that may still be under attack. The queenless hive was without a queen for 4 days. But it was the queenright hive that attacked.
Quote from: ArmucheeBee on February 01, 2009, 05:09:14 PM
I tried to combine using this no newspaper method, because I had the same type hives that rayb had and I'm feeding both hives. It was awful. 1000's of bees dead, dying, fighting. This is not a good idea. I sprayed everything, even had lemongrass in the sugar water. Terrible, I'll never do it again. Now instead of two weak hives, one being queenless, I have one very weak hive with a queen that may still be under attack. The queenless hive was without a queen for 4 days. But it was the queenright hive that attacked.
The queen right hive was protecting it's turf from what it saw as an invader, even with the use of sugar water and lemongrass.
There is a lot of factors not explained in the post about using this type of combine. Notice MB used the word weak. That more properly means remanant.
In trying to combine hives one strong and one weak it is necessary to break up the cluster of the smaller hive in the form of spacing out the remaining frames of bees so that each frame is a singular remanant. Such as: if the weak hive is down to 4 frames then spacing the frames in a 10 frame hive so that it is B E E B E E B E E B where B= frame of bees and E=empty frames. Even then it is chancy and a masking agent with a stronger scent that lemongrass is recommended, like Vanilla extract.
Another way is to approach it as a multiple hive split so that if you have 1 hive with 6 frames of bees and another with only 3 frames of bees you arrange the frames 1 2 1 1 2 1 1 2 1 E. But again that can be a tad chancy and a masking agent is advised. The best rule of thumb when combining hives, regardless of strength is to use the newpaper combine, no if's, and's, or buts.
thanks Brian
it was real bad. i paid $20 for those bees. i'll never do another non-paper combine. the queenrite hive was very hot to begin with, that was a factor I did not consider. they did the attacking, moved right up into the other frames. at first, I thought it might be just a few but then when I checked back in about 30 minutes they were almost all dead. I closed it up in disgust and have not been back in 3 days. i'll open on friday.