To join or not to join- that is the question

[Timw]

L. Inspection of a lWarre hive (2nd box) revealed no capped or open worker brood just patches of drone brood. Swarm hived 31 Oct. At last inspection 3 Dec there was some drone brood and also open and capped WB. The top box full of honey. Still plenty of foragers. The other hive on that site (small swarm hived 15 Nov) is 6 m away. Good honey and open and closed brood. Queen seen on 3 December/ not seen today but pretty busy and expanded into 2nd box since then. Given this doesn’t have a lot of brood - 6 frames - it’s a Warre. My inclination is to combine the queenless hive into the queenright hive. ( I’ve done this before once and it worked ok). Thoughts / comments?

 

[Mummzie]

any access to, or inclination to introduce a new mated queen?

 

[Timw]

any access to, or inclination to introduce a new mated queen?

I could but concerned no uncapped (or capped) brood and lack of nurse bees.

 

[Mummzie]

Valid point. from a Lang perspective, that scenario would usually be accompanied with the advice to add some brood also, for a more successful re-queening.
However, the books say the older bees will change from foraging duties and resume nursing. I think it would make for an initially slow buildup of the colony- and really depends on what you want to achieve / your appetite for experiment.

How do you go about merging warre hives?

 

[Timw]

Valid point. from a Lang perspective, that scenario would usually be accompanied with the advice to add some brood also, for a more successful re-queening.
However, the books say the older bees will change from foraging duties and resume nursing. I think it would make for an initially slow buildup of the colony- and really depends on what you want to achieve / your appetite for experiment.

How do you go about merging warre hives?

That’s interesting/ encouraging as it’d be relatively straightforward to requeen and possibly lower risk. It’s Easy enough to add the boxes to the queenright hive (above) with newspaper in between - takes a while for them to chew through and gives time to accept new environment. I’d be interested in further comments on requeening without added brood