Requeening using a Swarm (Did I do it right?)

[Carriage House Farm]

So...

I have this one colony.  It started as a nuc.  A nice nuc that had a massive amount of uncapped brood.  In transit I must have killed the queen (I saw before I left when we placed frames in cardboard boxes).  Within two weeks I had queen cells pop up, probably 15 in all on three frames.  Meanwhile new brood was coming out and they weer doing their thing and now I have two boxes of full drawn comb, packed with stores, but no brood.  I never had any queens, there are no virgin queens, nothing... just REALLY heavy frames full of food and lots of bees who have their clocks ticking and time is running out.

So...

I have this swarm I caught last week.  I figure I would see if the queen was laying, she was and man...the small cluster I had caught had drawn out three frames in a nuc and she was laying in them at a furious rate.  Nice pattern of eggs from what I can see.

So, I took those five frames (they had begun drawing out and storing in the last two frames).  I placed them in a 10 frame box with 5 frames of undrawn.  I put newspaper down on top of the queenless hive, poking some small pin holes with the point of my knife, and then placed the other small swarm colony with queen on top of the queenless colony with the paper in between.

Did I do it right or did I make a mistake somewhere?

Here are the pics:












I did it during the day and I got to witness the confusion of the foragers returning.  They eventually started using the next hive, which happens to have the entrance in the exact same corner as the nuke (by mistake).  No dead bees, so the other hive seemed quite happy to take the offers of new bees with lots of food.  That part seemed to work out OK.

[mark]

should work out just fine

[Brian D. Bray]

You did good.  You had a queenless nuc and a small feral swarm with a prolific queen.  Now you have a full sized hive with a prolific queen.  I think you did both units a big favor.

[Carriage House Farm]

Well I gave the newspaper a tug from the outside and they had chewed it up just right and it slid out.

I'll give them a couple days to get things working right and open 'em up and see how things are going...I need to see.  Tone of the hive changed noticeably, which gets me all giddy.

It also gives me something to talk about at market to a couple of our regulars who always ask about me bees.