Uniting two colonies over newspaper

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Never unite a colony you have not checked

This is the rule the rest of the page hangs off. When you unite, you hand one colony everything the other one has, including the things you cannot see. The National Bee Unit is blunt about it. Putting a poor colony in with a strong one can carry disease across with the bees. The weak one is the likelier of the two to be hiding something. Where a colony is actually diseased, it does not go in with anything until the disease has been dealt with. 1

A colony that looks well is not the same as a colony that is well. Small numbers of the organisms that cause disease can sit in a colony with nothing showing at all. 4 Moving comb between colonies is one of the listed routes by which disease travels round an apiary. 5 A unite moves every comb in the box.

• Go through both brood nests frame by frame, on the same day, before you decide anything. Sealed brood, open brood, the smell, the pattern.
• Wash the hive tool between the two colonies rather than after. The soda bucket is for exactly this.
• If you are not sure what you are looking at, do not unite. Ask your association or your local bee inspector first.

Two hives that die, or one that lives

Most hobby beekeepers unite because a colony is too small to get through the winter. The arithmetic is the reason to do it rather than feed harder and hope. The NBU puts the floor at five standard brood frames covered in bees, or the equivalent, at the point the colony goes into winter. Smaller than that, and its advice is to join it to another colony, so long as neither one has disease. 1 Below about 9,000 bees, which is roughly three full British Standard frames of bees, the chance of getting through winter is poor.

A small cluster loses heat faster and burns more stores per bee doing it. So propping a weak colony through the winter tends to fail twice over. It dies anyway, and it ate a lot of sugar first. Autumn feeding is arithmetic as well, and it does not fix a shortage of bees.

A note from my own hives. Last winter I lost three colonies. Two of the ones left I merged into one. The third went onto the last two frames I had that were clear of wax moth, with new frames added beside them, and into a nuc.

The other time you unite

The second reason is that swarm control has left you with more colonies than you want. You cannot go on doubling your hives forever, so recombining is the way back. Early in the season it is not usually sensible, because all you have made is a big colony that wants to swarm. Later on, as the swarming impulse falls away, you can put them together again for the main flow. 3

Do not rush it. If the queenless half is raising its own queen, wait until she is laying and has proved herself. Uniting to a queen who turns out to be no good leaves you worse off than you started.

Which queen goes

You need one queen at the end, so one has to be taken out before the boxes go together. Choose her yourself. Letting the two colonies settle it can turn into serious conflict, and Wally Shaw says plainly that he does not believe the old line about bees always choosing the best queen. From the beekeeper’s point of view the newer queen is usually the one to keep. 3

Judge them on what you can actually see.

• Age. It is better to go into winter behind a young queen. If yours is more than two or three years old, the NBU suggests re-queening after the summer harvest. 1
• Brood pattern. A solid slab of sealed worker brood beats a patchy one. A drone layer goes, whatever her age.
• Temper. You are making one colony out of two. If one of them is unpleasant to work, that is her contribution to the new one.
• When she mated. Queens mated from July onwards are less reliable through their first winter than queens mated in May and June. A late queen is not automatically the better queen.

Taking her out is the part nobody enjoys. The quick way is a firm pinch of the head and thorax between finger and thumb. The other way is to seal her in a small container and leave it in the freezer for at least 24 hours. 2 Do it away from the open hive.

Getting the two hives into one place

If the hives already stand side by side, this is nothing. If they are at opposite ends of the garden it is a job of its own. Flying bees from the box you move will go back to where that box used to be. The figure usually given for the distance at which they give up on the old site is three miles, and that is not a distance most of us have. 2

So shift the hive a short way at a time over several days, or accept that you lose the fliers to whatever is left standing near the old spot. Move it in the evening, when they are home. Three feet or three miles covers the ways round it.

The newspaper method, step by step

The National Bee Unit describes it like this. The queenless colony goes on top of the other hive, with two sheets of newspaper between the boxes, and the stack then stays where it is. While they work through the paper, the two lots of bees grow used to one another’s smell. 2

1. Late afternoon or evening, on a day the bees have been flying.
2. Take the queen out of the colony you are not keeping, and close it up again before you go on.
3. Take the roof, crown board and any supers off the colony that stays. It keeps its floor and its position.
4. Lay two sheets of newspaper flat over its top bars. Let them hang over the edges, then tear the overhang off so nothing sticks out for the wind to get under.
5. Lift the queenless brood box straight on top, square, with no gap at the join.
6. Put the supers, crown board and roof back on. Close up and walk away.

Some beekeepers make a couple of small holes in the paper to give the bees a start. The NBU description does not mention doing it, and they chew through either way. Do not cut a large hole. The delay is the whole point of the paper.

How long to leave it

A week. The NBU wording is that you should not touch the colony for a week or so. 2 That is longer than the paper lasts, and it is meant to be. On day two the two lots of bees are still working out who is who. Opening the box then is the reliable way to turn a quiet unite into a fight.

Feed if the joined colony is light, over the crown board, so you are not lifting boxes about. Keep the entrance small for the first few days. Late summer is when wasps and robbers notice a colony that is busy with something else.

What a good unite looks like a week later

Take the roof off and look before you do anything else. What you want:

• Torn scraps of newspaper on the floor and out on the landing board.
• One quiet colony working one entrance.
• No heap of dead bees outside, and no balling on the frames.
• One brood nest with eggs in it, rather than two patches with a wall of stores between them.

If there are no eggs, the queen you kept may not have come through it. Put in a test frame of brood with eggs on it. If emergency queen cells appear in a few days, the colony is probably queenless. 2 Working out whether a colony is queenright has more to it than the one test, and it is worth reading before you act on the result.

The other job for that visit is the tidy up. The united colony probably does not need two brood boxes of comb. Take out the frames it is not covering, and store the spare box properly with the rest of the comb.

If what you find is foulbrood

Then the unite is off and the law takes over. In England, an owner or person in charge of a hive who knows or suspects that bees from it are infected with a notifiable disease has to notify that immediately. The two notifiable diseases are American foul brood and European foul brood. 6

Once that notification is given, you must not take hives, bees, combs, bee products, hive debris or appliances off the site. That duty is about what leaves the apiary. Uniting is ruled out separately, because the NBU is clear that a colony with disease is not joined to another until the disease has been dealt with. 1 Leave everything standing and wait for the inspector. What to report, and who to has the contacts and what happens next.