I installed 2 packages on April 28. One package has a queen and eggs. The second one is queenless. I can tell by the behavior.
I also have strong hive in 2 deeps and 2 mediums that had started building swarm cells. The several that I saw were not yet capped but had young larvae in them on May 3rd. On May 3rd, I removed the 3 year old queen and five frames of bees, comb, honey, pollen and emerging brood and put them in a new location.
I plan on taking a frame with swarm cells from the old hive and placing it into my queenless package hive. I would still be leaving swarm cells behind for the old hive.
I figure that some of them may be capped by this weekend or a few days sooner. How long should I wait after they are capped before transfering them to the package?
Thanks
BoBn, I see no flaws with your plan, sounds text book. But, I am not as experienced as others on the forum. I would transfer the queen cells as soon as they are capped.
Good Luck,
Steve
sounds like you done this before :-D ;) , very good plan, glad to see you found the queen and moved her before she left. if you had some nuc boxes you could move a couple frames of bee's with a cell on one and start another.
Quote from: BoBn on May 05, 2009, 12:08:56 PM
On May 3rd, I removed the 3 year old queen and five frames of bees, comb, honey, pollen and emerging brood and put them in a new location.
I plan on taking a frame with swarm cells from the old hive and placing it into my queenless package hive. I would still be leaving swarm cells behind for the old hive.
I took out a frame with swarm cells as planned, and put into the queenless package hive on May 7. The strange thing is that I saw another laying queen in the hive that I removed the queen from. :roll:
I was at a Dewy Caren lives nearby my in Oregon and spoke at the bee school my chapter put on. In that he said that they were doing a study using queenlessness as a mite controll method. He observed that after they removed the queens from colonies and then went back to look for queen sign, about 20% still had a queen in them.
Quote from: bugleman on May 11, 2009, 03:33:23 AM
I was at a Dewy Caren lives nearby my in Oregon and spoke at the bee school my chapter put on. In that he said that they were doing a study using queenlessness as a mite controll method. He observed that after they removed the queens from colonies and then went back to look for queen sign, about 20% still had a queen in them.
Mid-summer splits achieves the same objective of a brood dearth that disrupts the varroa reproduction cycle. Why do all the extra work of doing queenless hives when a much simpler and easier implimented method already exists? On top of that, I've noticed that bees with Russian genetics have a tendency to induce a brood dearth of their own after a large honey flow.
Quote from: Brian D. Bray on May 12, 2009, 11:04:14 PM
Quote from: bugleman on May 11, 2009, 03:33:23 AM
I was at a Dewy Caren lives nearby my in Oregon and spoke at the bee school my chapter put on. In that he said that they were doing a study using queenlessness as a mite controll method. He observed that after they removed the queens from colonies and then went back to look for queen sign, about 20% still had a queen in them.
On top of that, I've noticed that bees with Russian genetics have a tendency to induce a brood dearth of their own after a large honey flow.
very true, they stop raising brood as soon as the flow stops