Yesterday, I combined two hives. I have one hive that started out as a swarm that I caputured which had no queen, or was killed in the heat of the battle. I then gave it a frame of brood from another hive and they made 5 queen cells. About 5 days ago, I checked and the queen cells had hatched.
I have another hive in another location that had swarmed and it was left with no queen. This hive has been queenlss for approx. 3 weeks. So I put the queen right hive on the bottom and then used the newspaper and sugar water trick. Then I stacked the queenless hive on top. Today I went back and checked and they chewed through the newspaper and are just one happy family now, I hope.
While looking through the hive today, I found a small area with maybe a doz. capped brood from the hive I thought was queenless. I'm thinking it's a laying worker. My question is, will the queen from the queen right hive search out this laying worker out and whip her a$$? Or will they cooexist?
I had this very same problem last year. I did exactly what you did and my results were not that good. They did not accept the queen and a few weeks later the colony became so weakened that Wax moths entered. The bees absconded and I was left with the other hives robbing out the combs.
I hope you have better luck than I did.
Mike.
Quotearea with maybe a doz. capped brood from the hive I thought was queenless
with laying workers, and you'll multiple per hive, you get drone brood. if it's regular worker brood it's not from laying workers. you could just have a failing queen. in that case, hopefully she will be the one killed.
Thanks Kathy, the area that had brood in it was very uneven kind of bulging out, unlike the smooth even surface with good brood.
Try to find a queen or an evenly laid patch of eggs in a week. Either will signal success. Uneven patches of eggs, multiple eggs in a cell, eggs half way up the wall of cells, will signal failure.