one of my father in laws hives is quite agressive, i had intent on requeening this one and made the attempt this afternoon.
BOY WERE THEY EVIL!
looked through the whole hive ( 4 med boxes ) and of course could not find the little witch!
almost half of this hive went airborne while i was going through the hive even though i used smoke liberaly
and frequently.
they were massing all over me and really going at me.
i decided that since i couldnt find her royal meanness i would divide the hive and conquer.
placed a queen excluder in the middle of the hive and will go back in a week to find if she is in the top or bottom of the hive. i will then split the queenless half out and place on another bottom board for 24 hours then introduce a nice queen that i have on standby.
i will then divide the half that has the queen in half again with the excluder and repeat the process.
the queenless half of this division will be recombined with the requeened half of the hive and then i plan to go through the remaining box to find the little witch and pinch her little head OFF!
the remaining bees will then be rejoined with the requeened section of the hive.
anyone have any better ideas to toss out? believe me i am open to any and all ideas!
they dont know just how close they came to meeting a large bucket of soapy water tonight!
thanks in advance.
bailey.
Don't you have 3 queen excluders? Why not do it all in one week, or actually 4 days?
Quote from: iddee on March 15, 2009, 09:32:22 AM
Don't you have 3 queen excluders? Why not do it all in one week, or actually 4 days?
I could lend him two more.
Robo, I believe, said one of the meanest hives he ever came across he worked right in the middle of pre swarm/ swarm mode.
Did you happen to notice a bunch of swarm cells?
Bailey, you could also use your beevac to contain and seperate numbers til you figure things out.
...JP
i only have the one excluder so that is not an option.
jp, there were no swarm cells, lots of room for brood being 4 supers high coming out of winter.
there were plenty of eggs and brood so i know there not queenless.
you sure that last swarm from last year didnt fly in from new orleans east? :-D
but not to worry! i will defeat the evil queen with determination! if you want to loan me the queen excluders to assist believe me i wont say no!
after my first cup of coffee i will go look at them and see what their status is.
bailey
If you want them, call me and I will meet you at the race track. These aren't Russian?
...JP
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesrequeeninghot.htm
thanks for the replys! i solved the problem before i had posted the problem and didnt even know it.
the bottom box was a deep that had no foundation when i put it in last fall. ( father in law insisted we add
a deep then )
i only had starter strips at the time so i put the upper 4 boxes on top of the deep thinking they would draw out some comb in there.
when i went through the hive i saw there was no comb building going on and there were a large number of bees in the bottom deep and on the bottom board.
not wanting another box to have to go through i took the deep and the bottom board and shook the whole thing out onto the ground 10 feet in front of the hive location. i had read about getting rid of a laying worker this way and thought well i will try this.
went back this morning to the spot where i shook them out thinking that i couldnt have gotten that lucky but there was a fist size ball of cold wet bees right in the same spot :-D
took the old hive tool and spread them out before they were warm enough to fly and spotted her on the ground.
i quickly invited her to take a swim in my little jar of alcohol :evil:
i then waited till noon, took a queen that i had in a nuke that had very few bees with her and put another medium over the hive with a news paper divider, then added the frames with the new queen and about 100 attendant bees.
requeening done!
all problems should work out so well!
bailey
I had the same problem. What I did was this. I took each deep and put them on different bottom boards. I placed them away from each other, then waited three days. The deeps without the queen started queen cells. I cut the queen cells out, put the new queen cage in and was ready to go. I took the deep with the bad queen and shook off all the bees from the frames with brood. I put the brood in the hive with the new queen. Then I took apart the bad hive and let the bees fly away to become feral. It works pretty good. I now have a nice hive and in a few months I will take brood and nurse bees to make a new queen so I'll have two hives again.