Hello All

Some of our members asked me to describe the experiment which I carried out
and which went wrong, resulting in the loss of all of the brood in a Brood
Chamber.

What I did was to split a colony using a Snelgrove Board, such that the
child colony (without the queen) was under the parent colony. I decided on
this positioning so that I would not have to lift off the child colony each
time I wished to examine or indeed put a super on the parent colony, as I
theorised that the child colony would not need any attention.

I placed a piece of linoleum on the wire mesh which I had in the Snelgrove
Board in order to (mistakenly) prevent the queen in the upper colony being
aware of queen cells in the lower colony and swarming as a result. I say
mistakenly, because I came across additional information afterwards which
says that the queen in the upper colony could become aware of events in the
lower colony only by trophallaxis (food transfer). Apparently it does not
matter if there is a mesh between the two colonies so  long as the mesh is
double and there is a gap of at least 12mm to prevent the bees touching one
another and thereby transferring the information. It appears that being in
the same atmosphere does not occasion transfer of pheremones. Can anybody
say if this is correct?

I did this manipulation three times so far this year. It succeeded twice and
failed once. The problem with this approach is that too many bees return to
the parent colony and one cold night can spell disaster for the child
colony. It would thus appear to be a 'chancy' procedure.

The proper procedure is of course to put the child colony over the parent
colony's supers, and have a double wire mesh in the Snelgrove Board (with
the 12mm space between the two meshes) so that the child colony has the
benefit of heat rising from the parent colony.

Ok you now have the need to lift the child colony each time you wish to do
anything to the parent colony. Placing a new super on the parent colony
would presumably cause some stress to the child colony because the position
of their entrance has been changed. Also I would theorise (there I go
again!) that manipulating the parent colony during the time when the queen
might be returning from her mating flight could possibly cause her to enter
the disassembled colony in error and be lost as a result.

But it seems to me as if the approach I took cannot be recommended, so next
time I am going to use the Snelgrove Board in the 'official' manner.

Thanks to all for the help I got in handling the problem of the dead brood.

Could I ask for some comments on the above, just in case there are still
bugs in the procedure.

A further refinement on the above is that when the queen in the top colony
is laying, that the Snelgrove Board be removed, and replaced by a Queen
Excluder and an entrance. Thus you have a two queen system as was discussed
in an earlier thread. I look forward to comments on the above please.

Wouldn't it be great to have next year's beekeeping knowledge this year!.


Sincerely

Tom Barrett
49 South Park, Foxrock
Dublin 18