I have read that a person can combine QUEENLESS hives IF all bees are placed into a new hive, in a new location.
I decided to try this today and so far everyone is calm.
In detail: I have a 5 frame nuc 80% capacity and two each two frames from a queen castle that are all queenless. Each had a virgin queen however the virgin queen never returned from the mating flight. These are the left overs in which the queen{s}was lost from my queen rearing operation. I have many successful mated queens in nucs, but there is always a few queens that never return from mating flights due to cat birds, dragon flies and such.
So in summation I have 9 {5+2+2} frames of bees from 3 different sources and no queens. So I combined all nine frames of bees in a 10 frame Lang brood box, which is in a new location, 20 ft from original location and added a frame of egg, larva. There was no fighting, and the bees are very calm, I just checked. I was surprised how calm the bees were,,, as if nothing new happened.
In brief: Normally when I combine hives, one hive is queenrite and the other hive is queenless and I place newspaper in between the hives known as a newspaper combine.
So what I studied did prove to be correct: that is frames of bees can be directly combined if all hives are queenless and all bees are placed in a new hive body, new location.
Hopefully the new hive will produce queen cells with the eggs and larva I gave them. If not, I have another batch of queens due to hatch 6/9/18.
I would appreciate feedback, your experience, on direct combining frames of bees from queenless hives, as I described above.