I put my ear to all of my hives this evening. Hive #3 has queens piping. Tomorrow I will take that hive apart, remove all of the queens I can find, mark them, put one back and make some nucs.
With some luck I will have a few more hives.
Jim
Good luck! I love hearing queens piping.
Hi Jim,
When you make up your nucs, do you just add the piping queen(s) as you make the nucs up, or do you have to wait a little while until they realize they're queenless and then add the queen?
Thanks!
Quote from: Rurification on March 21, 2017, 08:58:58 PM
Good luck! I love hearing queens piping.
Not me.
Usually when I hear queens piping that means the bees are keeping the queens locked in and separated so that they can super swarm (swarm until the hive is too weak to keep the beetles under control).
It is great if you want to make up nucs without having to graft queens.
Jim
Quote from: Linda M. on March 21, 2017, 10:20:25 PM
Hi Jim,
When you make up your nucs, do you just add the piping queen(s) as you make the nucs up, or do you have to wait a little while until they realize they're queenless and then add the queen?
Thanks!
In this case I will remove the queens, mark them and cage them. Make up minny nucs, 4-1/4 hives in a 10 frame medium box, shake in nurse bees, close them up, move them to a different yard, them add the queens back to the nucs.
Jim
Well I pulled about 12 queens out of the piping hive. Marked them all and put one back in the hive and the rest are in queen cages. Ran out of time/daylight so tomorrow I will make up the nucs and move them. I tried to shake bees into the quad minny nuc but without brood. They just left. I had enough bees to bee able to put the queen cages in there to keep them warm over night. I added wet rows to each.
Jim
You found 12 queens in 1 hive ?? Can you explain how a hive has so many and why please. Thanks in advance
I've found 14-16 swarm cells in a hive last year. It's not uncommon to find multiple swarm/queen cells in one hive. Most likely those queens were virgin queens.
Quote from: Kona Bob on March 23, 2017, 06:39:48 AM
You found 12 queens in 1 hive ?? Can you explain how a hive has so many and why please. Thanks in advance
When you can hear queens piping, it means that the bees are keeping the queens locked in their cells.
I learned this from listening to the queens in my observation hive. The hive has already swarmed at least once. Once the queens are fully developed, they are constantly trying to get out. The bees are constantly glueing the cap back on until they decide to let one out for the next swarm.
The minute you disturb the hive (even just smoking it) the queens are left alone long enough to cut open the cap and get out. Sometimes when I lifted a frame the q cells would break open and then we would find the queen walking around. Most of the time I opened the queen cells and allowed the queens to walk into my One Handed Queen Catcher which made it easy for marking them.
One queen got loose and went air borne after I marked her, we found her a few minutes later on a frame that one of my newbees was holding.
Jim