Japey Edge wrote: ↑27 Jun 2019, 13:26
Do you buy in queens or just requeen with your own?
This might sound crazy but in this instance could you replace all frames of brood in this colony with frames of brood from a well-behaved hive? Then they'll raise a good queen while your other hive just has those bees emerging.
Expect a lot of these bizarre questions from me, I'm really curious.
I re-queen from a selected queen of my own- being doing it for a few years now.
There are 101 methods of requeening. If you have a good colony you can use brood from that. But rather than just squish a queen, I would perhaps do a slower and more gentle approach as if you have a bad-tempered colony, they may well get worse if you make them queenless so I would do an artificial swarm. This keeps the queen laying with the older bees for company. After a week, the queenless part which has minimal older flying bees can have it's queencells removed. The colony will be very keen on either accepting a laying queen at this time or alternatively they will raise queencells from brood from your 'best' colony. Reduce any queencells down to one which is nicely dimpled and with luck you will get a mated queen. You can then unite with newspaper once the new queen is laying well - best to leave for 2 or 3 weeks - removing the unwanted queen first of course. The above is a quick summary - a few bits missing I am sure.