Roxanna Booms made this impression during a visit of macedonian, turkish, brittish and dutch beekeepers to my apiary. It was in the first days of oktober. I emptied 3 smaller colonies. The bees of those smaller colonies are united to one stronger colony of 4 or 5 (european) pounds of bees.
This boncing is the most rough activity that some of my bees are exposed on during the year. But they are within a few minutes not dizzy anymore. The emptied skeps will be broken out, for harvesting honey and wax.
What you see, is beside the boncing, looking for the queens. Therefor, the bees come into a strawring, with a queenexcluder. Most workerbees, specially the better and younger ones, instinctly walk through the excluder into the darkness of the skep below. The best of the queens, will be confined, with her old and new workerbees for 3 days, in a basket or box with gaze. After this necessary and forced harmonisation, queen and bees come in an empty clean skep and will build new combs and store new wintersupply by feeding them.
Those colonies are sain, but next year, they swarm up to 2 weeks later, compared with colonies that are not broken out. Probably this has to do with the loss of their pollenstorages. Because of that, they need fresh pollen for rearing brood whereas other colonies can rear brood undepending from the whether by using their pollenstorage.