how early can a new queen be marked
Anytime there are drones flying and the temps are above 55 F.
no I am asking if I can marker her the first time I see or should I wait till after she is laying
SORRY. My goof. I would wait until she is mated. Sometimes the marker paint is seen as a fault and the queen will be rejected. Less chance of that happening after she is accepted and laying.
Thanks that is what I was thinking. I did a split on 2-18-17 and I saw the new Queen yesterday.3-11-17 no larva or eggs I will look again next weekend. I am still pretty new at this
How big was the queen you found, at 13 days after split she would have been very small and hard to find.
Are there hatched or torn down queen cells in the new split?
At 13 days if she was a reasonable size then you may have taken the original queen when you split.
Quote from: brumas on March 12, 2017, 10:25:49 AM
Thanks that is what I was thinking. I did a split on 2-18-17 and I saw the new Queen yesterday.3-11-17 no larva or eggs I will look again next weekend. I am still pretty new at this
I'd leave her be for a while. Every time you open the hive, it disturbs the bees. Before long they start blaming the new queen for all their trouble. I'll leave it to more experienced beeks like iddee and LJ to say how long, but too frequent inspeactions can be bad.
Good post, Dallas. I would say don't open it again until at least 28 days after the split. Only long enough then to confirm eggs and/or larvae. If found, wait another 14 days and resume regular schedule.
So Brumas, how big was the queen you saw?
Did you see any hatched or torn down queen cells?
I'm with Dallas and Iddee,
I took apart my OH because the bees had swarmed 3 times and the queens were still piping. Marked all of the queens, cleaned the hives out and put one Goldie back making sure there were no other queens. That night I found one black unmarked queen in the hive. I guess they did not like a marked virgin queen. I do not know where the black queen was hiding.
Jim
Did the black queen fit the color of the rest of the bees in the hive?
Was she returning from a mating flight and ended up in wrong hive and due to the confusion has survived a while.
Also black queens are terrible to find at the best of times, that's why we run Italians.
Beavo,
She was the only black queen out of the 11 queens that I did find. Not sure where she did come from. It was too late (6:00 PM when we wer working on the hive) for her to bee on her maiden flight.
Jim
>how early can a new queen be marked
If you can catch her you can mark her... virgins tend to be flighty, though, and if they fly off you may regret the attempt...