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.