For thirty years of reading and listening to my mentors, I accepted
as universal truths, what I have found exceptions to in the past two years.
1] Laying queens cannot fly; so one could take a brood box a hundred feet
away from the hive, blow out the bees and only the workers and drones can
return.
a] Last year, to change from Italians to Carniolans, I put the
largest, most productive Italian queen in a NUC with a frame of brood and
took it to a site several acres away until I could give it to a friend.
When he came, I picked up the queen in my hand [instead of holding her by
legs on one side] and handed her to him. She escaped and, when last seen,
she was flying high in a straight line back toward her hive.
b] My newly mated supercedure anorexic Italian queen, who had just
layed two capped frames of brood, twice escaped through the plastic queen
catcher, flew around the hive and back into the front entrance. [on my
third try I palmed the queen in the catcher and made a transfer inside my
car to a queen cage].
2] Queen excluders [called honey excluders by some] prevent the queen from
laying eggs in a super.
See 1b for the exception to that. My queen catcher has more narrow
spaces than the queen excluders.
3] In a queenless colony, worker bees may lay eggs, often haphazardly,
producing drones.
a] Having made up a NUC, I introduced a Carniolan queen, who fled.
After some drone visits and then none for two weeks, there were and still
are no drone cells or drones. Two frames of brood, about 50% in the center,
are capped, with some larvae showing here and there. Bees developed two
swarm cells and two emergency cells. There were larvae in three of four
cells. The next week, only one supercedure cell was visible and it was
capped. I accidentally flattened it when putting the frames away. The
emergency cells were empty. The next time I looked, they had larvae in
them. A week later they were capped. Unless there is/was a queen in there
that is identical to a small worker, there is not and never has been a
queen in the box - and the Carniolan queen was gone 6 weeks ago. The
behavior seems strange to me and counter to what I had always believed to
be true.
John F. Mesinger
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