Hello Dan & all,
I will add a few thoughts to your questions and ideas. Since proving a
right and wrong is impossible we have only got two longtime beekeepers
talking about their observations.

dan hendricks wrote:



 1. I keep a queen excluder UNDER my hive to cause
 swarms to be self-retrieving.  Within 2 hours the
 swarm is back in the hive.

I find keeping a queen excluder during the year under your hive  to
prevent swarming a method i never thought of. I have used a piece of
excluder at the entrance of a swarm i cought for a day to keep them from
leaving the hive and going to the trees. I practice the open brood
method of swarm control.

 I find it hard to think that the queen is leading the swarm.  Does she
put herself on a diet?  Does she direct nurse bees to  start new queen
cells?  I don't think so.

I don't know if she does all those things and i imagine we will never
know for sure without asking her.  Your senario does suggest all chiefs
with one Indian or all imperfect females dictating to a perfect insect.
Hmmm.

 2. Bees in my observation hive move honey out of the
 queen raising area in the spring but spread honey
 throughout in the fall.  Is the queen controlling her
 rate of egg laying?:

You ask good questions Dan and i don't know the answers.  I would
imagine under normal conditions a queen simply looks in the cell,
inspects the cell, measures the size and if everything meets with her
approval turns and deposits a egg but there is no doubt in a beekeepers
mind she controls the amount of egg laying in early spring and winter.
One thing i have allways noticed is when hives are ravaged by varroa the
queen starts reducing egg laying accordingly.  Same way with tracheal
mites.  Allways a small ball of bees and brood in the spring. I never
see a small hive with a big hives amount of brood. If a small band of
bees survive winter then the queen only lays a small amount of brood
even when there is plenty of honey,pollen and open cells in the hive.
This is allways the senario with tracheal mite infestations. When i got
trachael mites for the first time. Every hive in the yard had plenty of
pollen,honey and open cells but all the queens(all were alive) were only
laying eggs in porportion to the amount of bees to cover the brood.

 3.  I overpopulated an observation hive one year with
 a swarm so moved the frame of capped brood into a full
 hive to emerge there. I did this four times before I
 permitted their brood to emerge in the OH.  The bees,
 now quite old, continued to nurse the new brood.
 Didn't this require rejuvination of brood food glands
 in the forager age bees?

I allways thought they could under emergency conditions. I would say
they did or a few emerged when you were not looking.

 4. When I have removed a queen from a newly-hived
 swarm prepatory to combining it with another hive, the
 bees obviously respond to her absence almost
 immediately, running around disconsonately on the
 bottom board.

I believe cought swarms are aware of the queen phermones more than a
normal colony and i believe research on the subject suggests so.

 But I have returned from winter to find
 a hive hoplessly queenless but bringing in pollen and
 acting entirely normal.

What i find is not the same as you. I never find queenless bees (after
all brood has emerged) bring in pollen.  50% of the time i find laying
workers.  Many times I find only a small band of bees. In all cases they
are not acting normally.  Late honey flow queenless bees will gather a
honey crop.  I make comb honey many times over queenless colonies when
the black Locust flow is on using Dr. C.C. Millers method.  I use
queenless bees because they don't bring in pollen to ruin the comb honey
as the pollen is bitter at that time of the year.

 I am not tuned to queenless
 buzzing but I doubt I would have heard such then.

My first mentor was around 90 years old and i was thirteen and he tought
me the sound by removing the queen from the hive.  He could catch a bee
in his fingers without getting stung,pull the pollen of its leggs and
release the bee unharmed.
Needless to say my fingers were allways swollen trying to impress him.
After awhile he showed me to practice catching drones first.  He said
after i could pick up bees without getting stung and hurting the bee i
was ready to pick up and handle queens.  I learned things about bees
from the old beekeeper i have never seen in books.
Sincerely,
Bob Harrison


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