question about packages

[jb78]

Hello everyone. I have packages of bees coming in a few days. I would like to take one of the queens and requeen an old hive and combine the 2 packages with the other queen.my question is will the 2 packages combine or kill eah other? Thanks for any help.

[VolunteerK9]

There may be some limited fighting, but I dare say that they will just be happy to have a home again. I would do it and not think twice about it. If you are combining 3 pounders, that will make a pretty impressive hive to start with.

[FRAMEshift]

When you are combining hives, you want lots of confusion.  Use lots of smoke, combine frames from multiple hives (you could mix frames from the hive you are re-queening) , brush bees off of frames into a different hive, etc. 

[T Beek]

As long as you KNOW FOR SURE the old colony has no queen (or even any laying workers) combining the new package using the newspaper method should result well.  Just hive it right on top of the old one as you'd hive the package any way, over a sheet of newspaper, placing queen with package in top super, since those bees will already be used to her after traveling w/ her. By the time she works her way downstairs any fighting should've been well settled.  

Much depends on how long they've been queenless or if they are in fact, queenless when you re-queen.  If a queen 'is' still there, you must find her and kill her (leaving hive queenless for one or two days at most) or both may die in battle.  Good luck.

thomas

[Wynoochee_newbee_guy]

Sounds like to much work. I would just buy another queen and have it sent with my packages saves on shipping then you have two new hives and re queened the old.

[iddee]

I would just spray the two packages down with 1:1 sugar water, dump them into the empty hive, and install the queen as normal.
If there is fighting, it will be minimal. With 6 lb. of bees in the box, you can spare the few if any that die.