Long story short, I have a hive that has now gone through supercedure 4 times in 1 year. Another hive that just tried to swarm. Split that up to simulate an artificial swarm, and also took a frame with a swarm cell on it and placed it with a frame of bees into a 5 frame nuc.
I checked yesterday and found the queen had hatched, though am 99% sure she is still a virgin as she could have only hatched for a day or 2. Once she starts laying should I cage her and put her in the "supercedure" hive after making it queenless for a day, or should I just move the nuc frames to a deep and do a newspaper combine with the old hive once it's been queenless for a day? Is there any reason the keep the nuc around when I don't have any more swarm cells to put in it?
I'd love to try some queen rearing but don't think that I'm capable of doing that yet. I could just let them make a new queen with her eggs, but as per Robo's advice I don't think that I have enough money for supercedure queens, I'm sure that I can't afford them :-D
Hi,
My personal preference would to combine the 2 colonies, making them queenright, as you described with newspaper. keeping intact a solid worker force, add supers as they combine to prevent crowding, after making sure the queen is establishing good brood patterns. Again just my preferences.
Barry