Greg
Can you briefly go through the process of creating a nuc from 2 marginal hives that may or may not have Queens?
Well, we have 5+7=12 frames to work with.
We don't have an incoming foreign queen (I assume).
You want to create the best possible queen-less resource from the dinks and try to get new queens mated and raised better than the dinky queens.
1) I'd dump them all together (newspaper or whatever) and let them choose the better queen (I don't wanna bother choosing).
2) In 3-4 days check to be sure there is a laying queen or not in the combined resource.
3) If there is a laying queen, find her and pull her out into 2-frame holding nuc (your backup plan).
You now have 10 frame queen-less resource that will set the QCs.
If no viable laying queen left for any reason and you observe QCs in progress - you are set by default.
4) Pretty soon you will have several best possible capped QCs (figure out the math) since the best possible workforce fed them.
You then split this resource into 2/3/4 mating nucs around the QCs available - based on what you have on hand.
5) Pretty soon you will have 2/3/4 mated queens in the nucs - based on how the mating went.
6) You have July/August/September to grow these nucs (recombine as needed) OR use those queens as needed elsewhere.
The point:
- you got yourself
locally mated queens, created and fed in the best possible queen-less resource from the combined dinks;
- likely the queens will be better than the original dinky queens (late June/early July - a very good timing to raise/mate local queens in most places);
- you have enough time to grow a viable unit around each of these queens
PS:
if you got an outside queen coming - you then plug this queen into the queen-less resource (skipping the details);
external mated queen maybe a better choice IF available and the source is desirable
if you have a better material source to raise queens in this queen-less resource - used that instead for new queen material
(ensure that QCs are created from the desirable source, not the dinks, in this case)