Mark Baird asked if he was doing the right thing by uniting a laying-worker colony with a queen-right colony.  Since some of the old timers seem to have missed this one,  I'll give Mark my 2-cent's worth.
    No, Mark, you are not on the right track here.  If you open the hive and the bees seem skitterish and buzz around a lot they are probably queenless.  If they've been queenless for several weeks, one or more workers will have started to lay unfertilized eggs.  They prefer to lay in drone cells, and will lay several eggs in each cell, sometimes sticking them to the wall of the cell because they can't reach the bottom.  I would not try to unite a hive in this state with any queen-right colony, since the laying workers will kill the queen.  Since laying workers are indistinguishable from other workers (I've never seen one laying an egg, and I expect few have ever seen one, period), you can try to eliminate them while saving the rest of the workers by shaking the whole hive out in tall grass 100+ feet from the yard.  The theory is that because laying workers have developed sexual organs they are too heavy to fly, and 100+ feet of tall grass will prevent them from walking back to the apiary.  Meanwhile, the normal workers will fly back and join new hives.  Generally a hive containing laying workers is more trouble than it is worth - even if you salvage the productive workers they will be old and soon die.
    However if your hive simply has a drone-laying queen, you can successfully unite it with a stronger colony (using your newspaper) as long as you kill the drone-laying queen.  Queens can become drone-layers in two ways.  First if a virgin can't get out to mate for 4 or 5 weeks she will give up and start to lay eggs, which of course are unfertilized, hence drones.  Once she starts laying she never will fly out to mate, even when the weather turns nice.  The second way hives can get stuck with a drone-layer is if a laying queen runs out of semen with which to fertilize her eggs.  In my experience, a virgin drone-layer will also start off laying several eggs in one cell, but unlike laying workers, the eggs are all stuck to the bottom of the cell, never on the sides.  Under both of these conditions, the bees may at first seem content because they have a queen, but as the weeks pass they too will get increasingly buzzy and grumpy.
    Finding queens takes practise - usually by working for a commercial beekeeper and concentrating on the task so much that you dream about queens every night for a week.  It's mainly a matter of gaining confidence that you can spot her and learning to work a hive without causing the bees to run around.  Virgins are hard to find (I'm talking bees here) because they are nervously running around, but a laying queen is slow-moving and sedate, if you don't use too much smoke, or get rough handling the hive.  If you've gone through the hive twice without finding the queen it's best to close up the hive and try again another day, since the bees will have started running, making it more difficult to spot the queen.  You can find the queen by shaking the whole hive through a queen excluder nailed to the bottom of a super, but this has got to be hard on the queen.  I would only use this method if you are desperately trying to find a queen you are planning to pinch.
    The alternative is to use a marked queen.  Kind of off the topic here - but I used a marked queen in  an observation hive once at a fair.  The queen had a white disk glued to her thorax with a black '99' clearly visible in the centre of the disk.  To my surprise over 50% of the general public asked if this disk was natural ('No, Ma'am, are you naturally blonde?  Actually she got that number when the Oilers drafted her...').


Ted Hancock