In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards walks viewers through the process of merging a weak, failing nucleus colony with a healthy, queen-right colony late in the season (mid‑to‑late September) in North Wales. He explains why, given the cold weather and limited time for a virgin queen to mate, the only viable option is to combine the colonies. Edwards outlines the risks of queen conflict, demonstrates how to protect the strong colony (using a queen‑excluder or entrance adjustment), and stresses the importance of locating and killing the failing queen before merging. He then details a shake‑out method: moving the failing nuc a short distance, shaking each frame out in front of the strong hive so the bees perceive the strong hive as home, and finally shaking the remaining bees from the nuc into the strong colony. He discusses weather considerations (warm day needed), observations of bee behavior during and after the merge, and his decision not to combine frames due to disease‑risk concerns. The video concludes that the merged super‑colony should survive the winter.
Chapters
I have got an issue in this apiary that I need to fix before winter. This colony here, healthy colony, brood in all stages, queen right, everything is looking good. The colony next door is on only a couple of frames, and inside there is a virgin queen. Now, in previous years, maybe 5 or 6 years ago, I would've taken the punt on this, and I would've said to myself, well, you know what, that queen maybe got a chance to go out and mate towards the end of September. We might get a warm sunny day, the bees might be able to build up in time to get to a point where they can overwinter in North Wales. And I've realized that there comes a point in the year where it is just too late. Today was forecast to be the most beautiful day of the week, and it is pretty cold. Like, I've got a gilet on underneath this bee suit, and I am still cold with the ventilated bee suit on. So there's no chance of her going out and mating this point in the year. And even if she does, the results are going to be slightly dubious. So in an apiary like this where they've been shook swarmed and these bees are living in such close proximity to one another, all I'm going to do in this instance is I'm going merge these colonies together. That's what I'm going to show you today in this video. So the risks in terms of merging these colonies together is that the bees from one colony will kill your good colony's queen. That is the absolute worst thing that can happen at this point in the year, because this colony will survive, this colony won't survive. So what you do not want to do is put anything in place that can risk your good colony dying. Easiest way I've found of doing that is not by doing a regular combine, not by doing a newspaper combine, is by doing a shakeout on the dud after you have found the failing queen. Now, I've done shakeouts without finding the failing queen, and it can work, but I think you're just running the risk that the queens are gonna duel with one another, and sometimes the good queen will win, and sometimes the good queen will not win. We wanna make sure that the rubbish queen cannot lose, and the only surefire way of doing that is finding her and killing her. Now, I went into this colony over here maybe 2 or 3 weeks ago, And there was a virgin on the loose. And I didn't take action at that point because I thought it's a couple of weeks left, we might get the good weather. It's become very apparent we're not going to get the good weather now. So the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to close up the good hive. I'm going to go into the rubbish hive. I'm going to try and find that queen. And if we find her, we're going to kill her straight away. So you can see here, this colony is not very big at all. It's only covering 2 frames. And the bees are doing a very weird thing, which is huddling up in the feeder. Which I don't mind if the colony is completely ram-packed full of bees, but I definitely do mind if we think we've got a failing queen in there. That indicates to me that there's going to be no brood in here whatsoever. I'd love to be proved wrong, but I genuinely don't think I'm gonna be. So this is the colony that I think is failing. This is the colony that is doing very, very well. So I'm just going to cover up the good colony there just so we don't get any bees flying over and taking a pop at the good queen. Let's get in here, see if we can find that virgin. Right, so I've had a really, really good look through that colony there. Probably spent maybe 10 or 15 minutes trying to find that virgin, and she is definitely not in there. So I'm gonna have to slightly amend this technique. And this is what beekeeping is like. You do need to be reactive. You need to have a backup plan. I really do wish I'd killed that virgin a couple of weeks ago, but I'm going to show you inside this colony first to give you an indication as to why I think that virgin isn't going to make it, and also to show you the signs of a colony that I think would probably fail going into winter if this is what you're seeing at this point in the year, which is around mid to end of September. Now, if you spot the virgin here, definitely give me a shout in the comments because I cannot see her. But this frame here is pretty much all stores. There's some empty comb around the edges, but there is just nothing in here whatsoever. If we take a look in the middle there, we've got some polished cells, but we've got intermittent nectar going into there as well. Which tells me that the bees think there's gonna be no eggs going into there anytime soon because there's not a nice, perfect spherical shape of cells being prepared for that queen. Now also, they will do this at any point in the year, but when they are queenless, they definitely do tend to protect and react to play cups like that a little bit more. Got a few of those knocking around on this frame here, but I suspect if I was to add some larva in at this point, they would try and create new emergency queen cells. So we're going to tweak this method a little bit. And the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to put in place some protection on the good colony. So you can do this in a number of different ways. On a nuc, it's very easy. All I'm going to do is turn the entrance disc round and get it to the queen excluder setting. So by turning that round like that, that means that when I shake out those bees, if there is a virgin in there, she is going to struggle to get back in through that entrance. Now, even without that entrance there, I'd like to think that the bees would kill her when she comes back in, but that just gives me a little bit more protection. Now, if you're gonna do this on a colony, like a full-size colony, what I would suggest doing is lifting up your bottom brood box, putting a queen excluder underneath, and then you can just proceed as normal. Just giving yourself a little bit of extra protection there to stop those queens ever meeting if you can't find the virgin or the failing queen to kill her first. Next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to package up all of the failing nuc along with the frames, and I'm just going to take it off over there out of shot of the camera, maybe 2 or 3 meters away, which means that when I shake them out, they're going to think that this is home. They're going to think that the good nuc is their home because it's next to where that location is. This method here only really works if you've got 2 colonies directly next to each other. If you've not got that, you can still shake them out, But you're not really doing a merge. You're basically scattering those resources all the way throughout your apiary, and that does work just as well. So you can see I've just got the one hive there now. The failing nuc is in a completely new position over here. So then all you need to do, it's really, really simple. Take each individual frame and you're just going to shake it out in front of the hive like that. You'll see you'll get some that go down onto the floor. Do it on a nice day, but the majority of them there, they Fly up into the air, and all they're gonna do is think that this hive here is now their new home. Continue that with all of the frames, and then make sure that you do not put the original box back, the failing nucleus back in that position. Give the bees no other option but to go into this nuc here. Then finally, I'm just gonna shake out the nuc, all the bees going out there. And as you can see, it is absolute chaos. Do this on a nice day, don't do it on a cold day. On a cold day, they fall to the floor and they die. On a warm day, they go up into the air like that and they cluster up where you want them to cluster up. Now at this point, if you're comfortable in doing it, you can combine the frames together if you know that there's no disease risk. I know what Richard would do in this instance, he would be melting down all of those frames there and starting again. Wouldn't be merging the frames together. I'm probably 50/50 on that one because it's a shook swarmed apiary here, and that split never had any brood in it because it was a split made up with a virgin queen. However, I am going to follow Richard's advice, and I'm not going to put those frames together. But as you can see, the bees very, very quickly calm down and congregate on the front of the entrance. So you should end up with something like this, and I know it looks a little bit extreme, but believe me, those bees will get accepted They get very desperate at this point in the year. Come back here tomorrow and there will not be a single bee left. Even come back here at kind of like 7 or 8 o'clock tonight, once it gets dark, every single bee will be in that colony there. Now if I go to the entrance here, what you'll see is that interaction between those 2 colonies. Not seeing a huge amount of fighting, are you? And you're still seeing some bees coming in. The majority of them though, they are clustering up there, so they're not making a massive attempt to get in at the moment. And if you've done it right, you shouldn't have too many bees knocking around on the When I say do it right, I mean shake them out in the right place and do it on the right day. All of these bees on the floor, you can see them marching up there already. They will work it out very quickly and they will end up in that colony with all of the rest of those bees. So there we go, 2 colonies combined, a good colony, a failing colony, have merged together into a super colony, and I have no doubt that these bees will make it through winter.
