Did my second inspection today and almost heart attacked. Picked up a frame and me and daughter was looking for the queen, and other things also when my daughter spotted her moving down the frame to the bottom and then she just bailed off the frame. I just about died. I happen to have the frame over the hive and she fell back in the hive.
Dang, does that happen often?
Luck was with me today
Danny
If she's a mated queen in an established colony she likely will always fly right back in. It happens.
...JP
It can happen so that's why i teach new beekeepers to always hold frames over the hive when they inspect them. Also if young bees fall off they land in the hive and not in the grass, they don´t always find there way home.
Have opened queen mating hives , located the queen and beefore I could catch her she took to flight and flew over my head and disappeared into the sky :'(
What to do :idunno: close it all up and take a look later , the next day there shy was, this time I was faster than her and caught her in a queen cage :-D
mvh edward :-P
I'm always extra careful when working with new queens. They can still fly pretty well and are a lot more "skittish".
Scott
Last week I caught a queen out of a swarm still on the side of a tree maybe a dozen times before I could get her into a frame cage. Every time she flew right back into the swarm. Thank goodness it was a smaller swarm.
Reminds me of a story that a friend told me. He was helping a kid put a package of bees in a hive for a 4-H project. The kid's whole family was standing nearby, watching. He got things set up, pulled the queen cage out of the package and told the kid that it would be better if the experienced bee-keeper pulled the cork from the queen cage to expose the soft candy. He was holding the cage so that the kid and his family could get a look at the queen inside. Then he carefully pulled the cork, but from the end with no candy, and while they all were watching, the queen came out of the hole and flew away.
He didn't know what to do, so he just acted like that happened all the time. He put the cage in the hive anyway, dumped in the bees and closed it up. He said that when they opened up the hive for the first inspection, that queen was in there.
:-D The bees know what to do despite all the things the beekeepers get up and tries
mvh edward :P