At 08:57 01/06/96 -0700, you wrote:                                             
> Hello All, I was adding boxs to my bees that I srarted on April 6th of        
>this year and noticed something. Out of the 25 hives that I added boxs         
>and took a look inside , I saw a big difference in brood patterns. About       
>30% were solid and made me think about all the honey they will make.Then       
>come the ones with cells that were void, about 100 or more on a frame of       
>snip<                                                                          
                                                                                
Hi Roy and everyone else, I have already send details of this post to the       
list but I'm not sure if it got to you all, can someone out there confirm I     
am posting?                                                                     
                                                                                
My first post to this list, thank you all for your interesting topics in the    
past.                                                                           
                                                                                
I have been managing bees now for about 18 months so be nice please!            
                                                                                
Roy ref your post: I have a couple of colonies producing solid brood            
patterns (mainly dark european race)but they are much slower building up,       
ie; when other colonies were on 8 frames of brood the dark bees were on 3 or    
4 but not a cell missed! I'm afraid I culled the queens as I need a really      
early build up for the oil seed rape.                                           
                                                                                
My request for help is:                                                         
                                                                                
I raised my first batch of virgins yesterday using my friend's incubator.       
The problem I had was the delay in introducing the queens to mini nucs. I       
got tied up with swarms, helping old ladies etc and ended up putting the        
queens in about 8 pm last night. They hatched after lunch so were unfed for     
up to 6 or 7 hours.                                                             
I used some bees from a local swarm and made up mini nucs before going to       
collect the virgins. About 1.5 hrs later I slipped them in to the closed        
mini nuc boxes, on checking this morning 8:00am the nucs are still roaring!     
I haven't released the bees yet.                                                
Any advice on what I am doing wrong and perhaps a better method.                
                                                                                
24 hours later UPdate:                                                          
Bees have now been released, I will check tonight to see if the virgins are     
still around, it looks like one lot have left their box and joined another      
around 6ft away. I have made some more minis up this time I found that          
taking young bees from the top super on a queen right colony works better as    
presumably these bees are relatively young.                                     
                                                                                
Regards                                                                         
                                                                                
Ken Black                                                                       
      -                 Ken Black                                               
       "  `             Bay Tree Cottage                                        
       "   `            76 East St, Fritwell                                    
   _- -_`-_|'\  /`      Bicester,                                               
 _/ / / -' `~()()       Oxfordshire, England. OX6 9QF                           
  \_\ _ /\-._/\/        00441869345725 Fax:00441869256678                       
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