I tried EO's this spring and they seems to do as advertised. My colonies are
booming and very healthy.

However, during the trial I decided to do a walk away split. I pulled the EO
syrup from the split but gave the colony some very diluted EO sugar syrup to
help it through the queen rearing time. I checked the colony and it had
three nice supercedure cells, so all was well. However, the colony cast
three swarms, all at the same time and all to the same tree, right when I
was in the bee yard. They were small swarms. I decided to wait a few days
and see if there was a queen in the colony and there was not, so all three
queens swarmed.

My guess is that the EO did a good job, even diluted, to mask the queens and
the bees did not know what was going on. I removed the EO syrup, replaced it
with plain sugar syrup, gave the colony a frame of eggs and larva and that
colony is again booming.

So, take care using EOs in the colony when doing walk-away splits, as the
bees might also walk away. Strictly anecdotal, but seems to have good logic
behind it. I did talk to another beekeeper who did the same thing with the
same results- EO, walk-away spilt and a queenless colony (but that could
also be, in his case, that they never started a queen).

Bill Truesdell
Bath, Maine

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