Uniting Colonies

As I said a few weeks back we had to unite 2 of our colonies due to one of our queens not laying. I thought I'd explain how exactly we did that. Now first you must understand that bees know their fellow sisters due to pheromones and bees in their hive who aren't friend are foe. So how exactly do you get two groups of bees to become best friends and work together? We had never done this before, had read about it but never put it into practice.

Firstly you have to bring the 2 hives you're uniting close together, about a meter. Then you have to go through the weaker of the 2 and remove the queen if necessary- this is how Queen Margaret ended up in a matchbox in the freezer! You can just squish this weaker queen but I couldn't bring myself to do it.

During the process, you can see the newspaper layer

The second stage means opening up the hive that will remain- the main hive. You place newspaper between that main brood and the queen excluder. If you're clever you buy a big posh paper like the Financial times as it fits rather well, I on the other hand used a newspaper I found at work which happened to be the Daily Mail, as a smaller paper we used two sheets with a small overlap. You then take the brood box of the weaker colony and pop it straight on top of the queen excluder. You then shut it all up and hope they become friends.

Our uniting colony

What happens next is the two colonies will chew through the paper and slowly they are united, this allows the colonies to get used to each others 'smell' are they harmoniously become friends. Quite amazing really. You need to go back a few days later to remove the queen excluder and allow any trapped drones out (they're too big to fit through the queen excluder). Then after a week we went back and took off the top brood box and just left it with supers. There was a small pile which looked like ash under the hive which was in fact tiny bits of newspaper! It's worked really well, the bees are all happy and the queen in the blue hive is pretty chilled so we now have a strong rather lovely colony to go through the winter.

the queen excluer after the process, you can see small bits of newspaper left at the bottom