What would happen if you took a few strong colonies in the spring, took the queens and made nucs, so now you have a couple of strong queenless colonies.
What if you then combined the queenless colonies? You'd get a huge amount of flying bees together. Would they gather more honey?
If you made sure they had eggs/young larvae for them to raise a new queen, then yes. Some beeks do this to seriously increase honey production. It needs to be timed properly with the flow, about 3 weeks before the flow. What happens, while the queen is developing, the existing brood is capped/hatching which means they are not feeding brood. All production goes to honey storage.
Jim
Exactly right... the problem is.. you have to split them up again before queens start to emerge, or you will have the MOTHER of all swarms issue from that hive..
Haha, yeah that would be a big swarm :-D
I meant to keep them queenless. You could either take all the uncapped brood at the start, or go back and remove the queen cells (make more nucs?).
Could give them capped brood to keep the numbers up... I wonder how big it could be.
It's not something I'm actually thinking of doing with only a few hives and not a lot of experience. I wonder if this would be a good way to make comb honey, actually, without risking swarms. Thanks for the replies.
You do not want to make them queenless. That would demoralize them and slow down production. They have nothing to work for because they cannot survive a winter and they know it. They would also end up with laying workers which would defeat the whole idea. Now they are feeding drone brood instead of worker brood.
Jim
as loog as you are feeding them brood you shouldn't get a laying worker. but it would be allot of work and that one week or two everything hits at home and you can't get in to work them off they go. better to work them make sure they have enough bees and room and let them do their thing in this case. once you have a bunch of hives then maybe play with one or two.
Quote from: troyin17331 on November 01, 2014, 09:45:15 AM
as loog as you are feeding them brood you shouldn't get a laying worker. but it would be allot of work and that one week or two everything hits at home and you can't get in to work them off they go. better to work them make sure they have enough bees and room and let them do their thing in this case. once you have a bunch of hives then maybe play with one or two.
Agreed..
Giving them brood,and making sure they have the repeated ability to raise queen cells may just work, but I would wonder if it was worth it?
By the time you pull brood from other hives, you weaken them. Every 14 days you have to pull queen cells and give them eggs/larvae to make more queen cells, further weakening the donor hive.. and if your going to make splits with the queen cells? Where do you get the bees/frames to build up each split?
I think it MAY be a viable idea, but when the entire method is looked at, it seems a lot of work for very little gain in Honey production.. IF there would be gain when the LOSS of production from the other hives is considered...
Just thinking.....