Info on uniting hives please

Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum

Help Support Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

freethorpe bees

Field Bee
Joined
May 27, 2010
Messages
658
Reaction score
1
Location
Norfolk UK
Hive Type
National
Number of Hives
Two - one fiesty, one lovely. ;0)
One of my splits is Q- although I know there was a virgin queen in there (eaten by swallow?). The test frame produced emergency queen cells.

I am now about to go out and unite them with another hive. Newspaper inbetween, wait 24 hours. After this point they will effectively be on double brood.

How do I get them back down to single brood? Tips and tricks welcome please.

FB
 
On the assumption that you want to go back to single, then I would make sure all frames with brood to the centre, with one frame of stores either side - store the rest (?freeze) to use later on.

Personally I would wait longer than 24 hours before sorting them out to give them plenty of chance to intermingle before you stress them by a major sorting out. I have lost at least two queens by being impatient in this manner........
 
I would wait a week after uniting with newspaper. Then put all the brood frames in the bottom and as said freeze any frames with stores for use when making up nucs or doing artificial swarms.

I am guessing that if you have too any frames of brood you will need to wait till they have emerged. I have not had this problem.
 
Just put QE excluder between brood box,s with no supers. After a few days check to see which has eggs, queen in that one. Put at bottom and rest of bees in top bb will emerge and eventually top box will be empty of brood. May have loads of trapped drones though. Then do what you want with frames, leave in for filling and feeding back or. Extract if your extracted can take brood frames. or..... Find queen and put her in bottom bb to start with, then QE then top bb and as above.. I think that was what you were asking for?
E
 
Once united, wait a week, not 24 hours, then shuffle the frames into one box. If you have extra brood (which I doubt if broodless/queenless) they can go into another hive. OR just leave as a double brood and over-winter like that? Sealed stores don't need the freezer to preserve them if you take them off.
There's not been a lot of income recently (well not 10 miles away from you) so I don't suppose the colonies will be awash with stores! :(
 
Thanks for the replies everyone. No idea where I got the 24 hours thing but that's the beauty of this forum, you learn!:)
 
One of my splits is Q- although I know there was a virgin queen in there (eaten by swallow?). The test frame produced emergency queen cells.

I am now about to go out and unite them with another hive. Newspaper inbetween, wait 24 hours. After this point they will effectively be on double brood.

How do I get them back down to single brood? Tips and tricks welcome please.

FB

Nothing wrong with any of the advice already given, but there are a few shortcuts to save you extra work later. The bees are queenless and so will very readily accept the thing that is about to befall them.

Thus you can avoid having to re-arrange the broodnests (and thus the 24hr/1week issue) by uniting with an excluder in place (best if it is the framed wire type but works ok with others too.) In this case you place the newspaper above the excluder (or even above the super as well and unite the deep right on the top) and just make one or two tiny cuts in the newspaper with the tip of the hive tool. Not tears the bees can pass through, but cuts that then give an edge to start chewing at.

You can also bypass the traditional newspaper method by using air freshener (seriously, it REALLY works perfectly). Simply open the top of the hive you are uniting TOO, give it a spray all over the top, and also the underside of the one you are placing on top, stick them together, walk away, job done. Its a very common method abroad where the newspaper way is considered archaic. ( recommended is 'Air Wick' type, which used to be known as 'Haze' ) First saw this being done (and was quite surprised at it efficiency) quite some years ago by Andrew Scobbie, a well known and highly respected beekeeper in Scotland. He is less fussy than me about the amount of spray used, just gives a puff into the gap as he adds the second box. I should just add that we are doing that when adding two queenright colonies as well with no issues arising when doing so, which is a far more difficult unite than adding a queenless unit, yet it works just as well. Unless we have avery good reason to do so, we do not select the best queen or kill or remove the other before uniting, and just let nature take its course, and in about 80% of cases its the younger queen that remains in spring ( not always, and sometimes both do).

If there are a lot of drones in the split you are adding then these will of course be trapped above the excluder and will want to fly. Easily enough done by either staggering the upper box back a little after a couple of days, or inserting a twig or two there to make a gap. Do this AFTER the uniting has been done and the colony has settled. Drone colony loyalty is just about nil and a few days later most will have gone off sniffing out where there may be an opportunity for them and the upper split be pretty well clear of them.

There are so many variants to this way of working with so many potential outcomes that it could be a chapter in a book. I personally would not have been giving up on the split just yet unless it already had laying workers or a drone layer.....even after uniting on top. Thats another tale altogether and way off thread.

One word of warning that is 2012 specific, and has never ben seen in any year prior to this. Do not trust the test/control frame method this year. More than half the colonies, in particular the black bees, have drawn cells on those frames even if a VQ was present. Seen the VQ running around among the emergency cells on numerous occasions this season. The swarminess was so hot for a while that they would then cast before the first cells on the test frame had even been sealed. this was due to there having been enough brood hatched in the split since the VQ emerged that they were able to do so. The method is normally reliable but it really IS a funny old season so far. Seems to be settling down now and amny of the previously unmated queens are now starting to lay, though a sadly high number have either vanished, started drone laying, or just seem content running about as a VQ. Fear for up to one third of the splits and nucs.
 
ITLD
Great well written info yet again.

Does it work when introducing Queens?
 
WOW! Thanks for all that info - I've printed it up for reading on the bus tonight!
 
Does it work when introducing Queens?

Never seen that way used for that job. HAVE seen a beekeeper open up the bottom box, leaving a 5 frame gap in the miccle, spray it, and then put the combs and bees from a queenright 5 frame nuc in the gap.............apparently works. Again, not done it myself.
 
I will tell Mrs REDWOOD to go and buy some tomorrow and I will nick it when shes not looking and tell her the smell was disgusting and I threw it in the bin :sifone:
 
they're powered naturally....nothing natural about an aerosol at all.

what's wrong with water and lemon grass spray, or sugar syrup spray?

The point is that you need to overwhelm for a while the scent of the bees, so they do not know they are all mingled together until its all over. For that you need something strong.

Sugar syrup spray will not work. Lemon grass spray, which I have never seen being effective anyway unless you have lots of time on your hands, MIGHT work if you used vast amounts of it. Almost a drench.

O)ne can of the other stuff unites between 50 and 100 hives, and only one can to carry about.
 
Last edited:
So not dangerous to the bees when they're sprayed?

Wow - this is a truly fascinating thread!!!
 
So not dangerous to the bees when they're sprayed?

Wow - this is a truly fascinating thread!!!

Not in the slightest. Remember its not the bees per se that you are spraying, its the interface between the two units that is being made into an odour barrier rather than a physical one as with newspaper, so what is being sprayed is mostly the airspace and the top bars of the lower box and the bottom bars of the upper box. Some bees will be sprayed, but not seen any ill effects.
 
On a similar vein I use a can of febreze air freshener, horrible over-scented stuff, to spray around when I have collected a swarm. Once the bees are in the skep/box I spray the site where the cluster was with it and it confuses the hell out of the stragglers and stops them returning to that site.

My only advice would be don't leave it in the car, my then 7 year old emptied about half of it to "make the car smell nice".
 
I am off to buy some airwick!

I had a hive that I did an A/S on but the part with old queen made new Queen cell on the 1 frame I moved over and swarmed, my fault for not checking. I took a QC and made up a 'nuc' but in full brood chamber (didn’t have any thing else).

original hive queen cells must have failed but the nuc one has come through.

So off to do my first ever hive unite
 
Back
Top