One possibility may bee to over winter the nuc above a double screen over the stronger colony. Provide a up entrance for the nuc 
Dave 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Aug 11, 2017, at 12:34 PM, Anne Bennett <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Steve Rose writes:
> 
>>> There is no way to 'save' a laying worker colony, because it is already
>>> genetically dead.  In all the other methods, where you put in frames of
>>> brood and shake and add queens, you are just combining it with another
>>> colony, but in a super labor-intensive and inefficient way.
> 
> Peter near Stratford-upon-Avon disagrees:
> 
>> If the laying worker colony has a large number of bees then those
>> are worth saving.  There is very little work involved in combining
>> it with a nuc.
> 
> ... which is all very well if one happens to have a nuc handy!  :-/
> 
> I'm grateful to see this dicussion happening now, as I have such
> a situation.  Or rather, my neighbour started with a split (of mine)
> and a (commercially purchased) queen last June, but while the queen
> was released from her cage, she doesn't seem to have survived: no
> sign of her, no brood nest, a few capped drone cells on frame edges.
> Unfortunately, he noticed the problem only recently.
> 
> (I'm gathering from a few sources that this year has been a poor one
> for queens in our area; another neighbour just up the street had her
> hive lose its new queen as well.  This is just word-of-mouth; I have
> no reliable stats.)
> 
> Anyway, now my neighbour would like to "save" his hive, and has read
> of a technique whereby one introduces a frame of relatively young
> brood once a week for three weeks.  According to his understanding,
> the pheromones given off by the larvae eventually put a stop to
> the laying worker problem, and the bees then raise their own queen
> (assuming of course that some of the donated frames contained eggs).
> 
> If all this had happened in June, I'd have no problem at all
> with donating the required three frames, but I understand that
> mid-August is when bees in my area (Montreal) start making winter
> bees, and I'm hesitant to possibly put my own (healthy, 4th-year)
> colony at risk of not surviving the winter, just to proceed with
> a technique whose chances of success strike me as "iffy" at best:
> even if it "works" and his hive raises a queen, will she be able
> to mate properly and to make enough winter bees before the cold season?
> 
> I promised my neighbour that I'd take a look at my brood nest this
> week-end and decide whether I can spare three frames.  If I decide
> that I can't, we're faced with the question of "closing down" his
> colony without letting it get robbed out (angry bees don't make
> good neighbours in the suburbs!) nor letting it become a mite bomb.
> 
> My thought was to reduce them to a single box, keep the entrance at
> the smallest setting, treat them for mites, and let them die off
> in their own time.
> 
> If anyone on the list has an informed opinion on (a) how risky it
> is to remove frames of brood from a hive preparing for winter, and
> (b) whether/how it's possible to let a hive die off without causing
> problems, I'd be most interested.
> 
> 
> Anne, backyard beekeeper in Montreal.
> 
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