This past week I recombined the two hives that I split previously. I had split them because they looked to me as though they were getting ready to swarm and had made queen cells. I split them so they would not swarm, and then allowed the queenless part of each split to raise a new queen.
After doing that successfully, I recombined them so they would be bigger hives, past the swarming impulse, and maybe do very well and store a lot of honey this year. I decided to “let the bees decide” which queen to keep, whether the new queen or the old queen, or whether to keep both queens and grow even bigger faster.
What I think has happened (or probably will happen) is that they will end up keeping the new queen.
In one of the hives, I moved the “super” (the top box where I found the queen) to the bottom, put a queen excluder on top of it to keep her down there, and moved the box that was on the bottom up to the top above the excluder. I will let all the brood in the box I moved to the top emerge and let the bees fill that box with honey, which I will then harvest. That box on top is the one with the misshapen comb spaced too far apart and has cross comb (comb across more than one frame) and burr comb and some frames that have an extra comb hanging off the face of the main comb. It is a real mess. These frames are non-standard home-made frames too, so they will be removed and not reused, and the wax will be melted, filtered and reused for either making candles or something for the hives. After that I will add a standard sized box with standard sized frames for them to either continue expanding the brood nest or to store honey.
On the second hive, I put the small box on top of the two large boxes. The bees in the small box were very calm and it appears that they have a new queen. That is also now recombined with the original hive it was split from. That means there will be two queens in that hive at least temporarily. Again, the bees will decide what to do about that. I did, though, not think it through completely so made a mistake. I should have put a piece of newspaper between the hives so it would take them some time to get used to each other and share each other’s pheromones and not fight. I neglected to do that, so there was some fighting and some dead bees as a result, but I don’t think it will be too bad. I don’t think too many bees will be lost. Regardless, it’s already done and nothing I can do to go back and do it over again, so I just have to accept whatever the result is.