mean hive divide and conquer question

[aladin]

re michael bush's requeening a mean hive, i don't have any caged queens, but i do have two 2 frame nucs and a mean hive.

will a nuc placed in the original hive spot, or newly transfered to a 10 frame box and placed on the old spot be overrun and the queen killed by the returning mean field bees, or will they peacefully join the nuc?

if they would overrun the nuc, will it work to put the nuc over the new box, seperated by newspaper as in a combine? do they need to be queenless for 24 hours before this is set up? or is the time to chew thru the newspaper enough?


thanks.

[ScadsOBees]

That is a good idea, and I did that last year for the same reason.

I don't think that the returning field bees have too much to do with the hive politics. The bees in the hive will let them in if they have honey, and they should merge well. Hives are often strengthened this way, by switching a strong and weak hive all of the field bees from the strong hive help strenghten the weak hive.

By transfering them to a 10fr box that will make sure there is enough room for them to cluster.

Rick

[Michael Bush]

>will a nuc placed in the original hive spot, or newly transfered to a 10 frame box and placed on the old spot be overrun and the queen killed by the returning mean field bees, or will they peacefully join the nuc?

I've seen them ball a queen when I did similar things with a nuc. I don't know if they would have killed her as I tried to resolve it by other means. A full size hive usually does ok.