The reason that two frames bees fail is that it is the start in spring to bring forward brood. It cost food, and enough bees to cover the brood area to rise the warm 35 degrees Celsius. Two frames bees do not have this power. Maybe Finsky with his aquarium heather could get it to work, but without NO.
Jorn, makes good sense. I do not have the aquarium heater and really don't want to buy one. So, what should I do with this 2 frame colony. This queen was one of the better queens that I had last summer, she was great!!! I wish that I could "save" this colony, if anything for the queen, but do not want to expend a lot of time and money, it would probably be easier in the long run to just let the colony perish, but that is such a sad thing, I hate to do it.
I tried something last year that was a failure. Learning new stuff does take its toll. I had two colonies, one was strong, the other much weaker, both queens were really good layers. So what I did was I put the weaker colony on top of the stronger one for warmth. I put two queen excluders between these colonies so the queens could not meet. I guess that was a huge mistake!!!! The bees from the colony on the bottom went up and must have killed the queen in the top colony. The the bees from the top colony must have gone down to the bottom and did something to this queen in the bottom box, I will explain what I saw in a minute. I know the queen on the top colony was dead, because I found her on the ground, dead, with quite a few bees mulling around her. Oh dear. So I took off that colony and put it aside and requeened. It was good. So a few days later I looked into the bottom colony, sitting all on its own now, and I saw the queen. Yikes!!! that was the scariest thing I had ever seen. She was walking around on the comb, but looked really awful!!! There was a bee that had obviously bitten her, then this bee must have died somehow, maybe the bees killed this bee. But this stupid bee was stuck on the thorax of the queen. Its mandibles must have "locked". I picked up the queen and tried to get the bee off of her. Not a chance, it wa stuck tight. I thought that there was no way in the world that I could ever get this bee to become unattached to the queen without doing some very severe damage to her. So I killed this poor old queen that had been walking around with this bee stuck on the side of her thorax. I requeened this hive too, it turned out to still be an excellent hive....until the varroa destructor attack!!!!
Is this what would normally occur if someone put two hives together with two different queens. I am of the belief now that I could have done this, but should have had a wooden divider so the colonies could not go and kill each others queens. I don't know. Just learning and learning and learning some more. Great day. Cindi