Combining Beehives: The Newspaper Combine for Weak Colonies

You open the hive in late August and count three frames of bees. Maybe four if you're generous. The cluster is thin, the stores are light, and you already know what you're looking at. That colony is not going to make it through winter on its own.

This is exactly the moment the beehive newspaper combine was built for. Combining two colonies into one gives the weaker bees a fighting chance by folding them into a stronger population that can actually hold heat, defend itself, and survive the cold months ahead. But combining beehives is not a fix you reach for without thinking. Done right, it saves a struggling colony. Done wrong, it takes your strong hive down with it.

Why Is Your Hive Weak in the First Place?

A weak beehive is always weak for a reason. Before you combine anything, you need to know what that reason is. Common causes include Varroa mites, a failing or missing queen, disease, and robbing.

1. Varroa Mites

They are the most common culprit. A hive with a high mite load is not just weak, it is sick. High Varroa levels increase the risk of viruses such as deformed wing virus spreading through the colony. If you combine that hive into your strong colony without treating first, you are not saving two hives. You are infecting one.

Run an alcohol wash or a sugar roll and get a mite count before you do anything else. A 2% infestation level is a commonly used action point, but treatment thresholds can vary by season and region. Follow your local extension recommendations. Blythewood Bee Company carries a full range of Varroa mite control options if you need to treat first.

2. A Failing or Missing Queen

A failing or missing queen is another of the most common causes. A queenless hive or a drone-layer situation will bleed bees fast. Check for eggs and young larvae. If there is no laying queen and no viable queen cells, the population will keep shrinking until there is nothing left to save.

3. Disease

This is the one you cannot afford to ignore. American foulbrood cannot be managed by simply combining colonies. Do not combine a colony suspected of American foulbrood with another hive. AFB is highly contagious and requires proper diagnosis and management. Check your brood pattern carefully before you proceed.

If you are not confident identifying disease signs yet, beekeeping books that cover brood disease identification are worth having on the shelf before you need them.

4. Robbing

It can make a hive look weak when it is actually being drained. If you are seeing chaotic flight, bees fighting at the entrance, and wax cappings on the ground, your hive may not be weak at all. It may just be under attack. Close the entrance down and watch for a day before making any decision.

The honest answer here is that combining beehives before you know why one of them is struggling is a gamble with both colonies. Diagnose first. Then decide.

What Is the Newspaper Method for Combining Beehives? 

The newspaper method works by allowing two colonies to combine gradually instead of forcing immediate contact between unfamiliar bees. Bees recognize colony odors, and sudden introductions can lead to fighting because each group may treat the other as intruders. A sheet of newspaper placed between the colonies acts as a temporary barrier, giving the bees time to chew through it while their colony scents gradually mix. Over the next few days, the bees become accustomed to each other’s presence and can merge into a single colony with reduced aggression. 

When Is the Right Time to Combine Before Winter?

"Early fall" or "before winter" is not a plan. The beekeeper who acts in late August has options. Combine weak colonies early enough in fall that the merged colony still has suitable weather to reorganize stores and prepare for winter. Earlier is generally better, especially if Varroa treatment is still needed.

Here is an actual number to work with.

• The six-week rule: You want to complete your combine at least six weeks before your area's average first hard frost. Six weeks give the newly merged colony enough time to settle, adjust to a single queen, manage the larger population, and build its winter cluster before the cold forces it into it.

• Know your regional window: In most of the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast, that puts your deadline somewhere between late August and mid-September. In the upper Midwest and Northeast, it can be as early as mid-August, depending on local climate. Look up your county's average first frost date, count back six weeks, and mark that date on your calendar.

• Miss the window, and you are gambling: A colony that merges in October has almost no time to reorganize before it needs to cluster. The stress of combining on top of the stress of winter prep is a bad combination.

• Mite problem, start earlier: Add another week or two to treat and confirm the count is down before you merge. That pushes your real start date even earlier, which is another reason this decision works best in late summer, not at the last minute.

• Combining two weak hives: You are not saving two hives; instead, you are infecting one. Two sick colonies combined produce one sick, larger colony. 

How Do You Prepare Each Hive Before Combining?

Before you touch the newspaper, you have some prep work to do on both colonies. Consolidate the weak hive first. Pull any frames the bees are not covering and push the occupied ones together. If either hive is light on stores, feed before you combine. Get both colonies stable before you stack them.

1. Consolidate the weak hive first: Pull any frames that are mostly empty or have old, dark, empty comb. A good frame grip gives you full control when you are pulling and rearranging frames without shaking bees or dropping anything. You want the bees in the weak colony sitting on frames that they are actually covering. If you have four frames of bees spread across an eight-frame box, pull the empty frames out and push the occupied ones together. This makes the combine cleaner and gives the bees less dead space to manage on the other side.

2. Check stores in both hives: If either colony is light on carbohydrate stores, provide appropriate syrup while temperatures still permit liquid feeding. If the weak hive has been stressed by mites or a poor summer, get both colonies fed and stable before you stack them. Protein supplementation should depend on brood-rearing needs, local forage, and season.

Make the Queen Decision Before You Open Anything

Keep the queen from the stronger hive. Remove and dispatch the queen from the weaker colony the day before you plan to combine. When you give the bees one queen going in, there is no queen fight, no period of uncertainty, and no risk that the bees choose wrong. The newspaper gives them time to adjust to each other's scent. It does not reliably resolve a queen battle.

Some beekeepers say "let the bees decide" and leave both queens in. Sometimes that works. For a controlled combine, decide which queen to keep beforehand rather than relying on the colonies to resolve two queens after merging. Choose the healthier, better-performing queen. Colony strength alone should not determine which queen you keep. Start with her.

If you genuinely do not know which queen is better because both hives are similarly weak, keep the healthier, better-performing queen. A queen in her first or second year lays better and will take the combined colony into spring in better shape.

How Do You Combine Beehives Using the Newspaper Method?

Your protective gear is especially important on a combining day. You will also need a single sheet of plain newsprint or unprinted newspaper. Avoid glossy paper or sections with colored ink. Plain black-and-white print is fine. You will also need a pushpin, toothpick, or small knife for making slits. This is the core of combining beehives with newspaper, and it is genuinely that simple once you have completed the diagnostic work and made the queen decision beforehand. 

• Step one: Remove the top cover and inner cover from your strong hive. This is the hive that stays on the bottom. Its queen is already inside. Its bees are the colony the weaker bees will be joining.

• Step two: Lay one full sheet of newspaper across the top of the upper box of your strong hive. You do not need to tape it or secure it because the weight of the box above will hold it in place.

• Step three: Make a few small slits or punctures in the newspaper to give the bees places to begin chewing. The slits give the bees a starting point. Without them, combining beehives with newspaper still works, but it can take longer. Do not make the slits too large. 

• Step four: Bring your weak hive to the combine site. Move slowly. Do not shake the frames. Lift the box body of the weak colony, with all its bees and frames inside, and set it directly on top of the newspaper. If the weak hive was on a different stand across the yard, move it gradually over several days beforehand, shifting it a few feet at a time toward the strong hive location. Foragers remember the location of their hive and may return to the original stand after a short-distance move. Foragers from the weak hive will return to the old spot and not find anything. That is fine. You want to move the box gradually enough that the foragers keep finding it. By the time you do the actual combine, the weak hive's location should be right next to the strong hive.

• Step five: Replace the inner cover and outer cover on top of the weak colony's box. The full stack now looks like this from bottom to top: bottom board, strong hive boxes, newspaper layer, weak hive box, inner cover, outer cover.

• Step six: Leave the colony undisturbed for several days, then check that the bees have merged and the newspaper has been chewed through. Do not open the hive. Do not peek. Every time you crack the lid during this period, you risk disrupting the process before the bees have fully merged. Over those days, the bees on both sides of the paper will chew through it gradually. The slow exposure allows scent mixing to happen at the same time. 

What Should You Check After Combining?

Five to seven days later, lift the top box. If the newspaper is mostly gone and the bees are working calmly across both boxes, the combine worked. If significant fighting continues, inspect the colony carefully and confirm its queen status.

What a successful combine looks like: 

You lift the top box and see bees working calmly on both sides. The newspaper, or most of it, is gone. Some shredded pieces may be at the entrance or on the landing board. The colony moves as a unit. There is no obvious division between the bees that were on top and the bees that were on the bottom.

Look for fresh eggs, young larvae, and a normal brood pattern to confirm the colony is queenright. If you marked her before the combine, she is easy to spot. 

What a failed combine looks like: 

You see bees fighting at the entrance, or a cluster of dead bees piled just outside the hive. Inside, there may still be a clear line between the upper and lower populations, bees clustered on their own side and not mixing. You may find one or both queens dead.

If there is still active fighting after seven days, the most common cause is that a second queen survived when you thought you had removed her. Go through the lower box frame by frame and confirm you have one queen and only one. Remove any queen cells you find in the upper box.

If the combine has failed and there is significant die-off, assess what is left. A combined colony that fought badly may not have enough bees remaining to survive winter, even after the fighting stops. At that point, you are back to the original question: is there enough left to save?

Should You Split the Combined Hive Back Apart in Spring?

You combine in September, the colony survives winter, and by April you have a strong double-box hive bursting with bees. Now what? The short answer is yes, if the colony is strong enough, splitting in spring is worth considering. A healthy overwintered colony that built up from a combine is often one of the strongest hives in your apiary by May. That is a great position to split from. A nucleus hive can be a practical setup for a smaller split. A split pulled too early from a just-recovered colony can set both halves back. Give it time to really build first.

When you do split, treat it like any other split from a strong hive. You can use the parent queen in one half and introduce a new mated queen, or allow the queenless half to raise their own. If you go that route, managing a queen mating nuc properly gives that new queen the best chance of mating successfully. 

The colony that struggled in September and got combined can, with the right management, become the colony you are splitting for an increase by the following June. That is the real payoff of getting the combine right.

Conclusion

The colonies that make it through winter are not the ones that got lucky. They are the ones someone made a decision about in August, not October. Combining beehives is not a last resort. It is a management tool. The beekeeper who uses it early, after a real diagnosis and a clear queen decision, comes out of winter with a strong colony and options for spring. The one who waits too long, or combines without checking first often comes out with nothing.

Get into the hive now, count the frames, run your mite wash, and make the call. If the weak hive needs treatment before you merge, get your Varroa mite control sorted first. If you are splitting that combined colony come spring, queen bees are ready when you are. And if you still have fall prep left to do on your other hives, the beehive splitting guide is the next logical read.

FAQ

How to combine beehives? 

Move the weak colony box on top of the strong colony box with a single sheet of newspaper between them. Slit the paper six to ten times, replace the covers, and leave the hive alone for five to seven days while the bees chew through and merge.

How to combine bee colonies when both are weak? 

Diagnose both before combining. Treat for mites if needed, confirm there is no disease, keep the younger or more active queen, and consolidate both colonies onto only the frames the bees are actively covering before stacking.

How to strengthen a weak beehive without combining? 

Feed with syrup and pollen supplement, treat for Varroa if the count is elevated, and add a frame of capped brood from a strong hive to boost population. Only add brood if the receiving colony has enough adult bees to cover and care for it, and only transfer frames from healthy colonies.

How to combine weak beehives safely? 

Run a mite wash on both colonies first. If either is above the threshold, treat and retest before combining. Check brood for signs of disease. Remove the weaker queen the day before and confirm she is gone. Then proceed with the newspaper method.