Ms. Member, your laying worker hive may have only 2-3 laying workers. Most likely there are 200-300 or in the thousands, we just don?t know. If the 2-3 was indeed fact, that might be workable, but 200-300+ would result in queen loss unless you shake out the bees.
If you want to risk it: go ahead and shake out the lw hive 30 ft away. After the bees return, then combine. The hope is the laying workers have never conducted an orientation flight and therefore do not know where the home is. Let?s hope the returning foragers have not gone LW.
Your main problem is a poor queen and a combine will not help that as the combine will result in mostly forager bees and not nurse bees. Nurse bees are needed just as bad, maybe more so than foragers. Anyway to obtain a queen?
If that bee place you told me about, Next Door or de la Cruz farms [sourwood honey] has queens :I can arrange for you to have a new queen from one of those stores. I have account at both. Check on queen availability and text back to this message if either has queens.
Van