Jon

Yesterday I checked the final two nucs and found that one was down to two frames of bees but no queen whereas the other had just a handful of bees and a queen. The one with the queen is a colony I overwintered in the garden shed which had barely 2 frames of bees in November. It's surprising it survived at all given the lack of bees for heat generation in the winter we have just had.
I decided to combine them rather than loose the bees from the queenless nuc.
I brought the queenright nuc up to the allotments where I have my apiary and first of all I put the queen into a roller cage. I set the queenless colony to the side and placed the queenright colony in its place with the roller cage wedged between two frames.
I put the queen inside the cage as I was worried she could get balled by the bees from the queenless colony as there are very few of her own bees with her. There is always a risk of losing a queen no matter what way you combine two colonies.
The next step is just to wait while the bees from the queenless nuc drift back to the original site of the nuc.
if all looks well tomorrow, I will let her out of the cage. The idea is that the two nucs should integrate over 24 hours. Another possibility would have been to plug the roller cage with fondant and just leave the bees to release her.
There are other ways to attempt this. If I had a free Apidea, I would have put the remnants of the queenright colony in the Apidea and united over the queenless colony via newspaper. The problem is that I don't have a spare Apidea as I put the remnants of another colony into the only one I had handy last Wednesday.
This is a queen I would like to keep as she is a daughter queen of the best colony I had last year.
Fingers Crossed.