Nock, couple of questions and suggestions.
Q- do they have a laying queen right now? They may be cranky if their queen is gone, injured, and a new queen is in process of getting mated. Or new queen was lost and they are getting frantic. It may be they just need time (2 weeks) to settle down. Perhaps doing NOTHING is the best option for the time being.
Q- how much brood is in the hive now?
Q- how big is this hive you are talking about? How many boxes are filled with bees. The options 2 and 3 presented below are dealing with a robust hive. If you are dealing with a hive that is only one box, then do Option 1.
I concur with the advice that a knarly hive is difficult to requeen. There are different ways to requeen them without sacrificing a perfectly good new queen. Basically the approach is as follows:
First is to prepare your contingency. Makeup your backup colony. Buy the queen you want. Go to your choicest bestest gentlest hive. Makeup a nuc and fill it with 1 frame of brood all stages and 3 frames worth of bees. Setup your new queen in the nuc as typical caged introduction with candy release. Place that nuc out somewhere and forget about it for 2 weeks.
Now time to deal with the Knarly Clan.
- First find the queen, or queens as there could be more than one, and kill them all. Shaking all the bees through a queen excluder will find the queen(s), and the drones. Once that is done you have options to pick from.
Option 1: Split up and remove the hive.
- Completely split up the hive and redistribute all of it to your other hives. Newspaper combine the bees and resources in boxes atop your other colonies.
- Remove all of the hive components from the current spot so bees are unable to return there.
- This may make your other hives a bit edgy for a few days so stay out of the beeyard for a week.
- In 2 weeks time, go get that contingency nuc with the nice queen and set her up in a new hive where the Knarlys were. Boost her with brood and bees from your other hives to get it up to par.
Option 2: Nuc - Em all, give them cells
- Split up the hive and distribute all the bees and resources into multiple nucleus colonies.
- Completely remove the hive components from the current spot so bees are unable to return there.
- Wait 4 to 24 hours, then give each nuc a ripe queen cell grafted from your choicest queen bee. Put cell protectors on the ripe cells so the crazy mad bees do not tear it down. They will not hurt an emerging queen but they may tear down a ripe cell.
- Wait 3 weeks. Find which one(s) are mated and laying up a storm.
- Recombine the failed nucs with the successful one(s) into a hive.
- Go pickup that contingency nuc you made up at the beginning, sell it.
Option 3: Requeen with cells
If you are in middle of a flow and want to REALLY boost honey production, this is your best option. First, find and kill the queen(s) in the hive.
- Remove all brood, distribute it into your other hives. Ensure to be adding space to those other hives to accommodate the boost in population when the brood emerges.
- The Knarly hive is now hopelessly queenless, no queen, no brood. Give them 4 to 24 hours to settle down. Regardless of how much time you give they will still be cranky and now frantic anyways.
- Place 2 ripe queen cells from your choicest queen. Put cell protectors on them. Place the cells centered but 1 frame apart in the bottom brood box.
- Put a queen excluder on that bottom box. Stack your honey supers above the queen excluder. No second brood box.
- Wait and watch. Check for honey and harvest regularly. With no brood to feed the supers will fill remarkably fast. When checking and harvesting the honey, stay out of the bottom box!
- At 3 weeks, go down into the bottom box to check for eggs and larvae.
. - Success? Then add your second brood box if you wish and carry on. Sell the contingency nuc.
. - Failed? If the queen cells or the VQ failed, the hive will then be dwindling fast as old bees die off and probably has developed laying workers. At that point split it up and combine the resources with your other hives or/and shake out. Then go get that contingency nuc you made at the beginning of all this and set her up in a new hive nearby, but not in the same spot.
-->. Take notice that none of those options presented is there one that introduces a mated queen into the Knarly hive. This is important!
Hope that helps.
THP