For anyone who remembers The Saga of the Incompetent Split,
wherein the Beekeeper Accidentally Gives the Queen Away...

When last we left our "heroine" (me), she had examined the brood
boxes at the 4-week mark post-split-and-queen-loss, and found that
the dozen or so emergency queen cells that had been observed at seven
days post-split had been removed, and that there was so sign of brood
of any age.  Also, the "brood nest" frames contained nectar and pollen.

A few people on this list thought, at the time, that the emergency
queen replacement had possibly been successful, and advised me to
check again a week later before assuming failure.

There was no point in my opening the hive a week later, since my new
queen was not to arrive for a few weeks, but I did immediately put
on a robbing screen, knowing that the population would be dropping
gradually for the next few weeks, and I put in a QMP stick to
try to prevent the development of laying workers in the meantime.
My post here at that time was to enquire about whether that last
action was likely to work.

Today is the end of week 7 post-split, and I can report that the use
of the QMP stick appears to have been successful: there's still no
sign of brood of any type.  And therefore, I now also confirm that
the hive is indeed queenless.

What I found very interesting, though, is that while a few weeks ago
the brood nest area was clogged with nectar, in the presence of QMP,
the bees had cleared the nectar out of the area in the middle of
the brood area, presumably in anticipation of the laying of eggs
by the queen they believe to be present.   Of course, there's
no control group and this is not any kind of statistically valid
result, but it strikes me as very likely that the addition of the
QMP is what caused the bees to clear out an area of brood nest.
Has anyone here observed anything like this?

With respect to The Saga: the new queen is expected to ship tomorrow,
so I've added two partial frames of mostly-capped brood obtained from
my neighbour, and replaced the QMP stick with a fresh one to prevent
the bees from starting a queen on those frames between now and mid-week.

A(nother!) question for you experienced folks out there: is it
important for me to remove the QMP a few hours before introducing
the new queen, or is it okay to perform the QMP removal at the same
time as the new queen introduction?  Last time I introduced a queen,
I removed QMP the day before, but I'd rather avoid opening the hive
multiple times (I'm working this week and off to EAS on Friday,
woo-hoo!), and the queen will of course be in a candy-plugged cage,
so I would hope that this would keep her safe long enough for the
bees to decide that they like her...


Anne, backyard beekeeper, Montreal.

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