Hot hive Requeen Questions

[Beeboy01]

I've a few questions on requeening a hot hive using young brood or eggs taken from another hive. My little bee yard has six hives in it, #1 is a new hive which was a nuc and has now filled a deep with brood and honey. I would like to use this hive to requeen #5 which has gotten hot since last year.
  I was thinking about stripping #5 down to just the brood chamber and moving it over to the #1 location and moving #1 over to the #5 spot as a beginning. When I move the #1 hive over to the #5 spot I would set it up as a newspaper combine between the boxes from the two hives. This would give me a new queen and fresh brood at the #5 location along with the field bees from the hot hive.
  At the same time I was planning to find and kill the queen in the hot hive which will now be at spot #1 and drop in a frame of fresh egg/brood from the donar hive. This would allow the hot hive which is now queenless to start a new queen using genetic material from the donar hive. If there are any fresh eggs or brood from the hot queen I will move them back over to the #5 location so the hot hive will have to make a new queen out of the less aggressive strain. I might even try to set up a 5 frame nuc on the side if there is enough brood to work with.
  By doing it this way I  will be able to keep the #5 location going with a full sized hive that shouldn't even skip a beat for honey production and if the hive at the #1 location requeens and takes off I'll be ahead of the game with two hives with simular less aggressive genetic background.
  My main worry is combining the #1 hive with the field bees and boxes at the #5 location. I've used newspaper combines before with no problems but just dont want all he!! to break out at location #5 and end up loosing the good queen.
   I don't have any outyards where I can move hives to which limits my options. I only have my one beeyard to work out of.
Any thoughts?
Thanks


Ed
 

[Old Blue]

Go to the link below and watch it.  It shows a very straight forward way to handle the requeening of a hot hive.  what you are talking about sounds about right but the video may simplify it for you.  I just went through part of this same task and I wish I would have seen this first as it would have saved me a lot of serious grief.

Do not do this without making sure you are completely bee tight.  Don't over look your ankles or any thing.  Make sure your gloves are up to a worst case scenario.  If you get mobbed, any breach can be disastrous and with a hot hive it is likely in my limited but sorry experience.

Requeening A Vicious Honeybee Hive

Old Blue
Where the polititions, taxes and regulations make my hot hive look like a bunch of girl scouts.  In....
Kali-bone-ya

[Beeboy01]

That's a big help, thanks. My hot hive isn't as hot as that one but they still have an attitude and they get the rest of the yard worked up when I'm in it. I like the idea of using the queen excluders to isolate the queen, if I can't spot the queen when I move the hive I'll install some between the boxes. Bee suit, bee tight and fired up smoker for this job.

[hardwood]

Any hive, even the most docile, will become more defensive when it has a large population. If you just want to requeen using eggs why not just kill the queen and pop a frame of eggs in there from another hive? You'd have to mark the frame and go in a few (I would wait 5-6) days after and destroy all the cells on other frames but that seems simpler than moving hives. Are you needing a bigger population in the donor hive?

Scott

[Beeboy01]

Scott, I ws moving the hot hive just to decrease the total number of bees in it so the hive would be easier to work. There's nothing wrong with the donor hive, got it from Jessie as a nuc about two months ago and it is doing well. i'm starting to think that the best way woud be to split up the hot hive with keeping half at location #5 and moving the other half to the end of the bee yard. Then I can find and dispatch the hot queen, come back in as you suggested after 5-6 days to remove any emergency queen cell and drop a frame eggs/brood in so the hive will requeen. That way I'll always have the donor hive ready with fresh brood instead of using the entire donor hive for just one requeen, your suggestion makes a lot more sense to me than my plan. I'll be opening only one hive to begin with instead of messing around with two which is another plus. I'm not planning to increase my number of hives, getting  low on extra equipment and room in the beeyard plus just got laid off from my job so money is a bit tight right now. Just want to calm down this one hive and get ready for an extraction in another couple of weeks.