Very common for a beek to use smoke to calm honeybees, a standard practice utilized since early man. However, I rarely, almost never, hear of a beek using 5-10 minutes of sunlight on exposed frames to calm honey bees.
SUNLIGHT
I have combined frames from deferent queen rite hives; making sure to take only one laying queen and successfully created 5 frame nucs without any fighting. This is my standard procedure for creating nucs from 2 frame queen castles. Some would call my queen castles mating nucs, but there is a difference. My queen castles are a 10 frame deep Lang body with 4 compartments each with 2 standard deep waxed out frames. I add bees and a virgin queen or queen cell, thus, I can obtain 4 mated queens with 2 frames. Then as described I combine without newspaper, rather directly adding 1 or 2 frames of bees from the castle with 1-2 frames from support hive to create a new nuc. The single queen combined is always added with her frame of brood.
The point is: I was taught to always provide 5-10 of sunlight before the combine, smoke is not used nor needed. The bees remain calm, the entrance is normal and I can see the bees in the frames are not fighting as I grab different frames from different hives, I always peak at the bees.
A year ago, only one person, a well know fella here, was to point out above combine was standard procedure with Brother Adam. Although a different topic and Brother Adam was directly releasing MATURE queens. On Beemaster, that single fella was the only one I have seen refer to light as calming down on honeybees.
SMOKE:
The effects of sunlight calming bees is not well understood, Smoke is more understood. Smoke causes a honeybees stomach to enlarge, this is fact we can see. From an enlarged stomach we postulate the honey bee is preparing to gourge on honey in preparation of an emergency evacuation flight to elude a forest fire and total devastation of the hive.
Further smoke is believed to mask defensive pheromones. There are other methods of calm such as slow moving, no vibrations as bees immediately react to hive bumps. Work bees Bees on sunny calm days, wear light colored clothing, clean gloves from previous pheromones, especially stings.
My focus is on light, sunlight exposure calming honeybees to which I seldom see or hear about. Google search returned one positive post, just one.
Your thoughts??
Blessings