Four years of beekeeping, it was only a matter of time - I finally got stung. She crawled up my leg, got me with a glancing blow, the stinger was hardly in at all. I have lots of plantains in the backyard, chewed up a leaf and put it right on the spot, and I can't even find it now!
We're going to do the drone brood thing this year to help control the mites, Greg checked all three hives out back, they're going gangbusters, so they've all received their third super. Lots of brood evident, and lots of honey, those frames look like the classic rainbow of brood, pollen and honey. Yippee!
On a sadder note it seems we have a laying worker in the overwintered hive at my mother's house. Dang it! Greg wants to do a newspaper combine with the good hive - is it worth trying to put in a queen?
Four years and one accidental sting deserves an award!
Never had a laying worker hive, I would probably give them a chance to make a queen rather than give them one, they might kill.
Some people have been through it and insist on shaking them out cause of all the hits and misses, good luck.
...JP
you got 3 years 9 months on me. I had about 3 before an aberrant bee got me sunday. (I wasn't even working the hives)
Robo had a post about a "queening frame" for a laying worker hive, I'm only calling it that because that's what it looked like. - a large queen cage in the form of a frame; if I can find the post I'll come back and edit.
Edit: found it and saved it in bookmarks. http://forum.beemaster.com/index.php/topic,17867.0/all.html
I am new to beekeeping and on my first hive check I tried to not use gloves, got stung on the right thumb. So for someone not to have a sting in 4 years that is pretty amazing. :)
I've got Rob's frame, and it is going on the hive the day after tomorrow when our queen arrives. It worked for Irwin, and I am hoping it will work for us. The ive has depleted numbers, so I am giving it a frame of capped brood from a stronger hive and switching locations with another hive to give the numbers a boost. Hopefully, this will work.
Quote from: reinbeau on May 26, 2009, 06:51:11 PM
On a sadder note it seems we have a laying worker in the overwintered hive at my mother's house. Dang it! Greg wants to do a newspaper combine with the good hive - is it worth trying to put in a queen?
I agree with JP -- give them a frame of brood with eggs from another hive, and see what happens.
I want to hear more about the drone brood for mite controll. Shane Gebauer (general manager at Brushy Mountain Bee Supply) has a real neat way to configure 2 hives together to make getting at the drone brood easier.
Joan
Reinbeau,
This have been going around this year for the first sting
I have got my first sting this year too
Johnny
I think they're onto us, Johnny, they want to make sure we all 'enjoy' them! :lol:
What we're doing is putting an empty frame into position #2 in the middle super (mediums run three supers per hive body), letting them build it out, then pulling the frame in three weeks and feeding the drone larvae to the chickens (cut it right out of the frame) and put the frame right back in. You have to be sure to take it out every three weeks so the drones don't actually hatch. Keep it up all summer, theoretically you're cutting down on the mites (and feeding the chickens some nice high-protein brood!).
I get stung almost every time I break open a hive. :-D
Last week I got nailed on the right eyebrow (I've GOT to fix that tear in the veil). I was ok for about 6 hrs. Then the swelling got to the point I couldn't open that eye. But after 4 more hours it started subsiding, and after the 2nd day you couldn't tell it.
That has to be a record. 4 years and no sting. wow. lol.
4 years and no sting! you must have some pretty nice bees!
Quoteis it worth trying to put in a queen?
i did a lot of reading on this before i shook out my hive. i came to the conclusion that re-queening was not a good option. frames of brood given repeatedly over a course of weeks sometimes does the trick, but not always. i chose to shake my hive out rather than weaken others so early in the year. i figured that the bees would strengthen other hives so it would not be a total loss.
i have another that i am watching now. saw a smallish queen in it that i figured was a virgin. do not see her now, but again there are tons of drone comb and nothing else. drone comb all over the hive in no pattern. if it looks the same after another week, i will shake them out also. the numbers are down so much, it's not worth trying to save them and it's been 3 or 4 weeks that they don't look good.
guess the point of all that rambling is that you have options....you just have to figure out which is a good one for you :-D
What do you mean, Kathy, by shaking them out? Greg wanted to do a newspaper combine onto the new package we bought - is that an option?
i'm not sure. someone with more laying worker experience will have to answer. i figured that the laying workers would act like queens and maybe kill my good queen, but i don't know if that as a valid concern.
shaking out was just taking the hive across the field and shaking off-brushing off all the bees. i did it a frame at a time and put each frame in another box with a lid as i went. the bees went back to where the old hive had been and not finding it, joined other hives immediately.
It is best to shake out the hive to remove all of the laying workers when combining hives.
It is more probable that the queen will be accepted using newspaper combine and a laying worker hive but too often the queen is lost in the process. A hive of 20K bees can have several hundred laying workers and the presence of the queen is not sufficient to suppress all of them so the hive will continue to be a heavy dronw layer even if the queen survives the combine.
Remove each frame from the hive and shake all the bees off of it about 50 feet, if possible, in front of the hive. The laying workers will most likely not make it back to the hive. Some of the nurse bees that have never been out of the hive may drift to other hives in the bee yard but so what.