Hello Thomas. I'll call you next week. 
Adding frames of brood in the spring can sometimes not really help as much as you think. What happens is that you now expanded the area of brood the weak hives need to keep warm, especially at night.
What I like to do is swap a weak hive location with a strong hive location mid-day while bees are flying. This will boost the weak hive's numbers and allows them to warm, raise, and get over the hump. There is no fighting as the bees coming back to the weak hive, now at the former strong hive's location are loaded with pollen and nectar and exhibit no aggressive motives.
The strong hives only takes a temporary setback in field force bees and usually within ten days, they are back to the same production levels.
I use hive swapping many times in nuc building. I just simply can not move frames around sometimes as the logistics of bees, brood, never seem to work out. But swapping the nuc locations is simple, fast, and effective.
Adding frames of brood in the spring can sometimes not really help as much as you think. What happens is that you now expanded the area of brood the weak hives need to keep warm, especially at night.
What I like to do is swap a weak hive location with a strong hive location mid-day while bees are flying. This will boost the weak hive's numbers and allows them to warm, raise, and get over the hump. There is no fighting as the bees coming back to the weak hive, now at the former strong hive's location are loaded with pollen and nectar and exhibit no aggressive motives.
The strong hives only takes a temporary setback in field force bees and usually within ten days, they are back to the same production levels.
I use hive swapping many times in nuc building. I just simply can not move frames around sometimes as the logistics of bees, brood, never seem to work out. But swapping the nuc locations is simple, fast, and effective.