uniting vicious hive

One of my hives, on double brood, has always been difficult, such that I have only inspected about once every few weeks, but doing regular "tip" inspection in between ( checking for QC's on bottom of frames in top box).

Decided I needed to have a proper look so I put on my leather gloves and full suit and proceeded with stealth. Immediately they were at me. I managed to take top box off and move it a few yards away, and then retreated for flyers to return "home". Loads of stings and followed a good 100 yards.

After about an hour I decided to inspect the top box. They were still after me but, I went through and by luck spotted the unmarked queen, and squished her there and then, put the hive back together and ran!

I know they are likely to be even more angry tomorrow now. I plan on getting a QE with newspaper taped to it, quickly taking off cover board, slip paper+ QE on then put on a small queen right colony on the top. On top of QE I intend to place a small eke with an entrance, facing same way as main entrance, in order to let drones out of top box. Then run.

I then intend to leave them for a few weeks. Will that work or must I remove the QE and top entrance before then?

Personally I wouldn't bother with the eke. I have just done exactly what you intend to do. The most important thing is making sure there are no queen cells. What I did was to destroy queen and all queen cells until there were no more eggs in the hive. At that point I added quiet queen in bb over paper. No QE. It worked and within days their temperament was better. With no QE drones were no problem. No eggs meant my queen was likely to be wanted. No queen cells meant no queen to cause a problem.
I had to dress in bomb proof gear, three layers, three times, jeeeees it was hot! Big plastic gloves....But it was all worth it.
E

A swarm that arived last year is bad tempered. My plan is to find the queen and leave her in a queen cage for a week. So that all the eggs will be to old to make into Queen cells, then the following week remove her... A few days later will give them a nice queen from my own stock.

If I can't find her, then I will do an Artificial Swarm, to get all the flying workers and bleed the hive of bees. Then check again the next week. The AS will be given a ripe sealed queen cell in a cage.

Have placed a QE under the hive, to make sure that there are no drones contaminating the gene pool.

Sean