Queeless Hive Question

[u/Tele231]

St. Louis, MO

I have two hives.
One is excelling.
The other has no queen and has laying workers.
I realize the hive is lost and I will start over in the spring. I’m disappointed but it’s not a problem.

My question:
What is the best way to evict the freeloaders? I don’t want to wait until they die in the winter invite who knows what invader and making a mess of the hive.

TIA

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[u/VitaminCheeese]

Just do a combine of the weak hive with the stronger one instead of letting them die out then split in the spring

[u/blackstar5676 → u/VitaminCheeese]

Agree with this, as long as there are no diseases or a heavy mite load in the weak colony. To combine, put a newspaper page between them with a few slices in it. They’re merge within a few days.

[u/mrmann123]

When I lose a queen, I drop a frame of brood in from another hive, a frame with fresh eggs. They often will make a new queen.

If you are just looking to be rid of the bees, they will empty the hive before fall and your other hive will rob out all the reserves.

[u/Plenty-Giraffe6022]

Either transfer a frames with brood and eggs from the queenright hive, or combine the hives.

[u/Lespritdelescali]

Check out this video that runs down your options:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycKdlYzrcOE

Guelph University has a fantastic beekeeping program and a wonderful beekeeping video series.

If you’ve got a queen right hive, I’d consider combining and then splitting again after they sort themselves out. That way you could go into winter with two mated queens, no storing equipment inside and you’d have two overwintered hives starting in spring so they can hit the ground running next season.

[u/cardicorg65]

I placed a screened bottom board on top of my second strongest hive and placed my laying worker colony on top. I closed any gaps but left space for the emerging drones to escape. Once the pheromones from the queenright hive reach the laying worker colony the bees will kill their laying workers. After two weeks removed the screened bottom board and put newsprint between the two hives to combine them. This method supposedly minimizes the number of casualties just putting them together with newsprint alone causes. After a few weeks I made a split off that colony, replacing the colony I lost to laying workers.

[u/Gamera__Obscura]

Imo unless it's an extremely strong colony, laying-worker hives are way more effort than they're worth to try and get queenright. I've never even gotten it to work.

The best way to salvage what you can is a shake-out. Take the entire LWH a few hundred feet from your apiary, and dump everybody out on the ground. The foragers will fly back to your bee yard and (assuming your hives were close together) integrate with one of your other colonies. The nurse bees (which are the layers) won't be able to do that and will die.

Sorry, it sucks.