Charles:


What were the weather conditions and
hive setups for the packages?  Any correction for cool and rainy?
A package with no pollen stores and poor feed coming in is going to have a
LOT of spotty brood as larva dies and is removed.

____

Yup.  I've been around the block on this one, Charles.

Started the packages with a full deep frame of liquid, capped honey and a quart of sugar syrup, one or two clean, drawn frames, and the rest new foundations.  No old equipment that hadn't been sanitized first and no old comb. Checked to make sure queens were released.  Saw nice brood in one hive and "eh" small brood patch in the other for about a month.  Plenty of honey coming in, in fact this is the first time in 10 years that I've taken off spring honey.  Usually I wait until July to take off comb. I saw plenty of pollen too, lots of it all around the brood. Then the one pkg crashed (well it was queenless and I requeened it) and the other has been going downhill.  I expect to replace that queen sometime soon.  Honey still coming in and the nuc-derived colonies (the ones that I haven't robbed for brood to start more nucs) are doing fine.

Most packages in my experience don't keep their queens until winter.  By winter they are all new queens, if I don't replace them they get replaced by the bees.

I don't have your numbers, this is just my experience as a hobbyist.  No one should assume I draw any big conclusions from this, because I don't.

The club Peter Borst and I belong to is into its third year of queen-rearing workshops.  Lucky for us, Dyce Lab is taking over and they are doing a superb job so far.  We are aiming to train as many people as possible to learn how to replace unsatisfactory package queens (or any other queens they don't like) without having to resort to purchasing and shipping.  I'm sure the big queen producers won't notice a downtick in business, but it makes sense for hobbyists who are advancing their beekeeping skills to learn how to do this.


Christina

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