Okay, early this morning, I moved the three occupied supers comprising this "hot hive" about 100 feet away from their original location, each super on its own stand, then I covered them with a cloth. On the old location I stacked empty supers with 2 frames to collect the field bees.
I then set five empty nucs near the relocated supers. Next I went through the supers, one at a time, looking for sealed and emerging brood - using at least two frames of sealed/emerging brood with covering bees, per nuc. The remaining space in the nucs I filled in with combs of pollen/honey/nectar/empty. During this sorting, I kept my eye out for the queen, when I found her I made sure to make a note of which nuc I placed her in, I just couldn't dispatch her right then. There were ten frames of sealed/emerging brood, enough for these five nucs. Now I just need to produce enough queen cells to take care of these nucs.
As a new beekeeper, I am really glad to find "old" posts like this that give step by step details about routine beekeeping tasks. Thank you for sharing your knowledge, Joseph. Cheers from Canada.
I have 2 hot hives. Here's what I plan to do---comments appreciated. When I see the first drone cells, I will make two nukes from my best hive of one frame of mostly eggs, another of some sealed brood and one of honey/pollen. I will shake & brush mostly all of the bees off the frames as I take them out. I will set each on top of an excluder on each of my hot hives for a few hours. Nurse bees will crawl up to take care of the brood. I'll then set them next to or on top of the hot hives and feed sugar & pollen. When the new queens have started laying (about 2 weeks after emergence), I will kill the old hot queens, and a day later combine the nukes with their respective parent hives. The nuke bees will have been from that hive, so they should combine peacefully. Since I had the nukes beside the old hives, the field bees from the nukes should enter the old hives. This way I will not have weakened any of my hives much and I will have re-queened my 2 hot hives with my best genetics. If I have extra queen cells and other strong hives, I may make some more nukes.
The hard part of dealing with hot hives is finding the queen. That and calming them down right away.
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesrequeeninghot.htm