A first for me

GSF · October 07, 2015, 10:33:27 PM

Tuesday I was off and going through some of my hives. I had one that had a deep, medium, deep, with a queen excluder between the upper deep and medium. I arranged it like this because I was going to sell it at one time(medium & deep hive sell). The marked queen was beneath the queen excluder per my records and way of doing things. When I went in the top deep above the excluder, one of the first things I saw was capped brood. I'm like, dang, I put her in the wrong super. I went through and couldn't find her so I'm thinking she's going through the excluder somehow. As I put it back together I looked again and there she was. However this one wasn't marked. Now mind you, underneath the top deep is a queen excluder above it is an inner cover with a opening in the middle and also on the top where I've put lattice strips to keep the lid off of the bees.

Carefully setting it aside I go into the other one beneath the excluder to look at stores and ect. Again right off the bat I noticed a bunch of capped brood, and.., a marked queen. I can't figure this one out as to why. I can figure out how, but not why.

First, there's already a queen present with her scent in the hive. That means this one hatched, worked her way out through the top on her mating flights and returned the same way. Then instead of swarming she set up camp.

I've heard of multiple queens in a hive but this is a first for me.

tjc1 · October 07, 2015, 10:49:45 PM

That's pretty cool - you never know what they might get up to despite our expectations!

iddee · October 07, 2015, 11:10:29 PM

It is a common practice for them to raise a new queen if you put eggs above and not allow the queen to go there. The inner lid was enough to reduce the queen pheremones enough for the bees in the top super to think she was losing viability, so they raised another one.

GSF · October 08, 2015, 06:08:25 PM

The inner lid didn't separate them. The only thing that separated them was the queen excluder. I'm fixing to split them this evening. Thanks though.

rwlaw · October 09, 2015, 08:02:57 AM

Mel Disselkoen maintains that just the lack of queen pheromones on the comb is enough to stimulate the bees to build q cells. He's been trying to iron out the details so it would be a viable way to make splits. I'm not certain if he made any headway this summer.

BeeMaster2 · October 09, 2015, 08:16:14 AM

Gary,
It is possible it was a supercedure and you just have a mother daughter both laying eggs. The daughter returned to the upper entrance or went through the excluder. I have seen my virgin queens in the OH walking all over the hive.
It will bee interesting to see if the marked queen survives for a long time. How is the brood patern in the bottom section?
Jim

GSF · October 09, 2015, 10:31:22 PM

Jim, the brood pattern and the amount of brood in the bottom is awesome. I forget just how many frames but it's probably 3, 4, or 5 deep frames and a couple of medium frames in an 8 frame set up.

BeeMaster2 · October 10, 2015, 07:43:16 AM

Gary,
Keep us posted how long the marked queen stays in that bottom box.
Mind you, I'm not asking you to tear that box apart every week but if you do see her against or if you find she has been replaced, let us know.
Jim

deknow · October 10, 2015, 01:17:22 PM

Mike Bush has reported, and every time I've tried it it has worked, that brood above an excluder with an entrance will tend to produce queen cells...to make it almost foolproof (given reasonable conditions), but an excluder, a box of comb/capped brood/honey...and then a box with eggs/young brood above that.
I usually use queenless starters, but the above is how I like to set up finishers.....either 5 or 10 frame deeps.

mtnb · October 11, 2015, 11:18:58 AM

Quote from: deknow on October 10, 2015, 01:17:22 PMbut the above is how I like to set up finishers.....either 5 or 10 frame deeps.

Deknow, what does this mean? What are finishers?

GSF, that is so cool! Please keep us updated. I see you're in AL. Do your bees go into torpor?

GSF · October 11, 2015, 12:53:43 PM

Jim & all, I made a split a couple of days ago, then swapped the splits to balance the population/foragers.

Mt Bee Girl; "torpor"?

mtnb · October 11, 2015, 02:49:50 PM

Torpor..."Torpor is a state of decreased physiological activity in an animal, usually by a reduced body temperature and metabolic rate. Torpor enables animals to survive periods of reduced food availability. A torpor bout can refer to the period of time a hibernator spends at low body temperature, lasting days to weeks, or it can refer to a period of low body temperature and metabolism lasting less than 24 hours, as in "daily torpor".

I like words and I had someone somewhere use it in describing what the bees do over winter. I figured it was a beekeeping vocabulary term. lol Like fecundity...fruitfulness and fertility, the ability to produce abundant healthy growth or offspring...when describing the queen mother.

Dallasbeek · October 11, 2015, 03:00:56 PM

Looks like a good word to me. Dr. Thomas Seeley describes in "Honeybee Democracy" how scouts race over a swarm's cluster of bees when a site has been selected for occupation, telling the individual bees to warm their flight muscles for the flight to the site. Then, on a signal, all the bees almost explode into action and as one great mass head for the selected new home.

mtnb · October 11, 2015, 07:57:38 PM

I just ordered that book yesterday with my paycheck! Can't wait to read it.

BeeMaster2 · October 11, 2015, 08:11:38 PM

MT Bee Girl,
Bees do not go into turpur, they cluster. They keep the center of the cluster in the 90s all winter long. As the out bees chill down, the warm bees will go out and move them towards the center.
Jim

Dallasbeek · October 11, 2015, 08:42:02 PM

Quote from: sawdstmakr on October 11, 2015, 08:11:38 PM
MT Bee Girl,
Bees do not go into turpur, they cluster. They keep the center of the cluster in the 90s all winter long. As the out bees chill down, the warm bees will go out and move them towards the center.
Jim

You are correct, Jim, except that bees do, according to Dr. Seeley, reduce some body functions, and I would assume this is done to conserve energy. They then consciously warm flight muscles, in the example I cited, so that they are capable of flying. When in the cluster, they disconnect the wings from the flight muscles, activate the muscles used for flying, and burn energy in order to warm the cluster. The two things are unrelated, but my understanding is that they allow their body temperatures to drop for other reasons, probably in warmer weather. I think that could be a form of torpor, but had never heard that word applied to their actions.

GSF · October 11, 2015, 10:24:11 PM

I'm with you fellow's

quote,
(Oh brother, where art thou?)

Old Blue · October 18, 2015, 12:31:36 AM

Hey Deknow ! !
We just need to find out what finishers are.

Inquisitive Beeks wanna know, so, will ya school us a bit?

Old Blue

deknow · October 18, 2015, 09:09:04 AM

Sorry.

When raising queens, the colony that you put the newly grafted larvae into is called the starter.

For many reasons, it is more efficient to move the started cells into a finisher to complete the feeding and complete and cap the cell.

Most commonly, the starter is queenless and the finisher is queen right (with the queen excluded from the box where the cells are).

GSF · October 22, 2015, 09:57:02 PM

Okay gang here's a little update. I done the split. The new queen's hive became a target for robbers - big time. There's about 3 deep frames of bees left with the queen. The old queen (this year) is gone. No eggs, brood, larva, capped brood, just honey. So I did a newspaper combine this evening. In retrospect there's a couple things that may have happened. Like Jim said probably a supercedure midstream.

The thing that threw me a curve ball is the two supers the old queen was in was jam up with a beautiful laying pattern of brood. Comparing the two queens the youngest was fatter and more orange. The other was slimmer and darker, dark as in fruit going bad. She wasn't dark before. So what about the brood pattern? My guess is the house bees were moving them or passing them through the excluder, or not.