> you say there are ways of putting cells in queen rite
> hives in order to requeen, would you please tell us more on this
> subject.
I'm on lat 60 north, that Anchorage if you transfer to your side
of the pond. A pretty short and intense summer so I have to
cut time where possible to bee able to survive on beekeeping.
Haven't time to fiddle around too much with queens when I only
got june an july with good mating. So it's queenrearing, requeening,
extracting honey basically at the same time.
I have been using this method for a number of years with a result
that I feel is good compared to the time spent. I use cells that are
as close to hatching as possible. They are simply put in the top box
on a queen right hive just before the main honey flow starts. No cell
protector is needed when the old queen can't feel the new cell so far
from the brood area where she is. I haven't used excluders when
doing this, but it should be possible to leave a little hole in a corner
of the excluder (bend the wires a little?) so the virgin gets down.
When the virgin hatch, she will look up the old queen to kill her.
This is what happens in 80% of the hives. In 20% the old queen
survives and the virgin gets thrown out. This doesn't seem to depend
on the queens age, there are often older (3 years) queens. When it
happens I have to look up the old queen and remove her first,
otherwise the same thing will happen next time again. Some queens
might have stronger pheromones, or something else making the bees
prefer them even when old.
I have found that 60% of the hives will go into winter with the queen
I supplied them. In the remaining 20%, the virgin kills the old queen
and then the bees choose the emergency cells from larvae instead
of accepting the virgin. A majority of the hives make some emergency
cells when the old queen disappears, but generally the virgin will find
and kill those queens before they hatch. Maybe some just miss one cell?
There is another advantage with this system, the bees don't have any
larvae to feed during the honey flow so everyone can go for honey instead
and fill the supers for me. All the eggs are laid for the bees that are
going to produce a crop (3-4 weeks honey flow) and no more bees
are really needed at that time. The new mated queen will produce
enough young bees for wintering after the main flow on late thistles
and other nectar/pollen sources.
You got to know what you are doing, using this system when there
are some mistakes that can be made. First, don't put a cell in a hive
that prepares to swarm! They will fly straight away.... Then there should
be a flow going on so the bees got other things on their mind than my
requeening. And of course, make sure there are enough bees in the
top box to keep the cell warm until the virgin hatch.
It takes me 2 minutes to produce a queen cell. Another 2 minutes to
lift the lid and put the cell in a hive. If I do this on my ordinary rounds
to check the bees, there is no extra time spent on transports. I find this
quite a cost effective way to ensure a stable, no swarming breed of bees.
When 80% of the hives got young queens, they are not prone to swarm.
A very small amount of the hives (2-3%) end up without a queen, but
I feel that's a low cost to pay. I keep a few mating nucs for back up
so I can change those queens that goes wrong when wintering. Some
of those emergence queens are very tiny things that I wouldn't want to
leave in the hive over winter.
That's how I have been doing it. It's working for me, might not for others.
It depends a lot on where you are and how your season is.
--
Regards
P-O Gustafsson, Sweden
[log in to unmask] http://www.algonet.se/~beeman/
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