I'm righting a mistake. I got hammered by mites a couple of years ago, coming from someone else's collapsing hives, and the result was a major virus outbreak. I lost some hives, and bought some bees to make up numbers. I should have realised it wouldn't work. Queens I raised in the awful weather last year didn't mate properly, one of the new colonies was so bad-tempered I squashed the queen and got rid of it, and I wanted to dispose of the second queen, and replace her with a better one, before her drones started mating with queens I raise from other hives. I've been moving brood out of that hive all summer, and giving it to other colonies, to keep it small so it didn't produce drones.