Hey folk's, I did some splits yesterday turning 2 hives into 5. 3 with new queens. The original hives I left in place and at the advice of the old time beek that was helping me, I hauled the 3 new hives a few miles away. My question is how long should I wait till I bring them back? The old time beek suggests 3 weeks or so till the new queens young start comming off. I would like to know yals thoughts. Thank's, Brad
Quote from: RangerBrad on March 31, 2012, 11:07:03 AM
Hey folk's, I did some splits yesterday turning 2 hives into 5. 3 with new queens. The original hives I left in place and at the advice of the old time beek that was helping me, I hauled the 3 new hives a few miles away. My question is how long should I wait till I bring them back? The old time beek suggests 3 weeks or so till the new queens young start comming off. I would like to know yals thoughts. Thank's, Brad
I don't understand why you moved them away to start with.
You should wait until the old beek is out of sight. Next time, leave him home, or get him educated.
Quote from: iddee on March 31, 2012, 02:08:04 PM
You should wait until the old beek is out of sight. Next time, leave him home, or get him educated.
Exactly right iddee. :-D
i'm guessing that he wanted you to move the splits because if drift back to the old hives. that's easy to fix by simply switching the nuc into the old hive position.
next time do it at home. much easier and you have the old hive resources right there if your splits get into trouble. :-D
Quote from: kathyp on March 31, 2012, 02:36:00 PM
i'm guessing that he wanted you to move the splits because if drift back to the old hives. that's easy to fix by simply switching the nuc into the old hive position.
Well, it wouldn't take 3 weeks for the foragers to re-orient at the new site. If that's the reason, you could bring them back in 2 days or less.
Yes he was concerned about bees going back to the old site and when I asked him about doing the split and simply moving the old queen with a split he said the bees would go to the old queens new location. Brad
Quote from: RangerBrad on April 01, 2012, 12:41:22 AM
Yes he was concerned about bees going back to the old site and when I asked him about doing the split and simply moving the old queen with a split he said the bees would go to the old queens new location. Brad
It doesn't matter what you do with the queen. The foragers are oriented on the location of the hive. They will go back to that site. If you place a different hive at that site, they will go there, regardless of whether it has a queen or not. And it does not matter which queen it has.
The Beeks I know would only move a split to a new location IF they wanted to leave it there and establish a hive at the new location. Most of the time they would they will still do the split and not move it till it is established and determined OK anyway.