Hive 3 has been a problem for us all season. If you look back at this post https://cpbees.blogspot.com/2020/05/apiary-update-spring-2020.html you'll see that early in the season we had a lot of problems with the queen disappearing, and then laying eggs in the super (which is supposed to be just honey). It took a lot of effort to sort out, and we never properly got on top of it.
Since then the hive had been hugely tricky to manage. As soon as the hive was opened they would be up in the air and flying around us. And they could be pretty grumpy. It wasn't helped by the fact that there were just masses and masses of bees. It was a huge hive and just too hard for us to manage every week. So something had to be done.
A recap
Back at the end of April we "split" hives 1 and 4 (again, refer back to the post above). This was to prevent swarming in those hives. This left us with two small "nucleus" colonies which housed the originals queens from hive 1 and 4. You can see these on the left of the photo below.
So what we decided to do in attempt to settle hive 3 was fairly drastic. We removed and destroyed the queen in hive 3 (she was the one who's genetics were producing grumpy bees). We then separated the brood boxes (and therefore all the frames and bees) and "united" each with the two nucleus colonies, so each was headed by the original queens from hives 1 and 4.
The overall result is that we have gone from four full size hives (one of which, hive 3, was huge) and two nucleus colonies, to five sensible sized hives and no nucs. The new hive was positioned to the left of hive 1, which gave us a slight issue with nomenclature. The C programmers amongst you will be pleased to know that we settled on "hive 0", so our hive naming has become zero-based. :-)
