Combining colonies

[Wingy]

This season I’ve tried a new method of swarm control in order to keep my colony numbers down. It worked quite well and as such I’ve kept to 40 colonies going into winter. However some colonies ended up on treble brood and massive.
I would like to get rid of about 7 or 8 with queens I don’t like possibly even reduce to 30 for spring. I’m not anticipating loosing any over winter.
I have just completed removing my last supers and excluders and really had to squash them down to double brood.
I usually use the newspaper method to combine when needed but just wondering what you guys think would be the best time to do it on such a big scale? Pros and cons.
My thoughts are early spring when there are less bees ?

 

[Ely]

Just out of curiosity, was it the demeree method that you used?

 

[Wingy]

Just out of curiosity, was it the demeree method that you used?

Each colony that produced a charged queen cell I took all the brood off them and gave them drawn comb left Queen and all bees to carry on. The frames of brood I destroyed anything that resembled a queen cell and distributed the frames between other colonies

 

[Antipodes]

This season I’ve tried a new method of swarm control in order to keep my colony numbers down. It worked quite well and as such I’ve kept to 40 colonies going into winter. However some colonies ended up on treble brood and massive.
I would like to get rid of about 7 or 8 with queens I don’t like possibly even reduce to 30 for spring. I’m not anticipating loosing any over winter.
I have just completed removing my last supers and excluders and really had to squash them down to double brood.
I usually use the newspaper method to combine when needed but just wondering what you guys think would be the best time to do it on such a big scale? Pros and cons.
My thoughts are early spring when there are less bees ?

I'd probably lean towards reassessing things in spring. The brood and bees could come in handy to bolster weaker colonies at that time. If there is a bit of a flow on in spring they might combine with less fuss? I made a mistake last season combining colonies and getting rid of queens in the process. I wish I had them now.