Newspaper combine: Queen introduction

My blue hive queen has been doing poorly since the beginning of the year. The workers have been attempting to replace her but no supercedure cells resulted.  I found the queen Thursday evening and pinched her to kill her (Yes, it is very heart breaking to do this; I hate it). I then went to my other bee yard and took three pollen and honey frames from my big hive; which I had determined was pollen and honey heavy. I replaced these frames with brand new undrawn frames so that they can take some time to draw those frames out and their queen will have more room to lay.

Frame with pollen and some honey. Notice variety of colors (different flower sources)

Pollen in center and mostly uncapped honey surrounding

Thursday night I also went out to close one of my nucleus hives with  some wire mesh. When I went out there I saw that a skunk was rubaging through the grass in front of my big hive. I went back to the house to get the camera (shotgun would have been more appropriate) and this is the poor picture I took.

Skunk at my hives!

I followed it around for a bit to figure out where it was from but it took off and left a pretty nasty scent. I went back to the hives and put a wire mesh on the entrance to the nucleus hive that I was going to combine with my other hive.

The next morning I brought the bees and all my gear to the other bee yard. I placed the single sheet of newspaper down and put a small slit in the middle of the paper with my hive tool and then put all of my frames into the top box.
When I was placing the nucleus frames into the top box I was inspecting them while holding the frames generally above the box. I heard a very faint thud. The sound of bees falling and landing onto newspaper actually. It turns out that the very thing that I was looking for, fell right down into the box. It was the queen. Not a word of a lie. Had I not been holding the frame above the box, she would have fallen on the ground and all of my work would have been for nothing!

Saturday, this is what the newspaper looked like! It looks like the two hives are pretty much combined!

Lesson for the day: Always inspect frames while holding them above the hive box!