Hi all, 

Allen commented that patties were eaten by bee during a good flow. 
We feed patties non-stop on our cell raisers and they chow on 'em during any flows. 

Also a comment on runt queens. I should mention that we get most of our runts from splits that fail to take a cell or the the queen that hatched was damaged, eaten by dragonflys, or went into the wrong hive. 

Our management plan includes a daily supply of queens for up to three crews a day. That means careful ordering and maintenance of queens so that every beekeeper has queens in the truck every day. We're getting better at that. This is probably our last week to carry them. Any duds now will get stacked or blown out in the fall. But we generally requeen right up the the 20th of July in northern Michigan.

It's easy to see which hives aren't whitening up and we can quickly dig into them. If we can't find the dud queen quickly, I recommend shaking every last bee out away from the hive, put a good hive on the pallet where the dud hive was, and restock the dud unit where the good hive was to pick up field force and maybe even throw a super from some other hive that is packed with bees on top. It will be ready for Cal. or to ship back to Florida, but not necessarily make honey. 

And I also agree with Allen that many hives make new queens without our knowledge and they are good queens. The bees are pretty good at that overall. 

We had some heavy swarming this late spring and about 80% came back with a nice queen. The rest we had to fix. 

k

Kirk Jones

Sleeping Bear Farms   beekeepers making honey...
Benzie Playboys           cajun and zydeco band........

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