New Bee Package details (as promised a couple of weeks ago - sorry - remodeling project crisis happened!)
This video moves around kind of a lot but it shows two queen cells my packaged bees made immediately after their queen was released during the first week after “installation”. Packaged bees come without any frames or comb - you get bees and a queen - they have to make their own hive.
Per instructions, you install the three pounds of bees with only five frames (instead of the usual 8-10 frames) to start out - giving the bees a chance to begin focused comb-building so the queen has a place to lay eggs and the workers can begin storing nectar and pollen to make honey.
Another way to start out with bees is with a nuc -- short for nucleus or hive nucleus. In a nuc - you get a small box with five frames of comb that the bees have already pulled and been working. In the comb, there will be some food stores and some brood (eggs, larvae, capped bees developing). This gives the bees a better chance of survival, and reduces the chance the bees will swarm or leave, initially. When you install a nuc, you transfer the started frames into a big box, add empty frames (or frames with foundation only), and the bees and queen are all ready to go to town : raising they brood they’ve already made and expanding into the big hive.
However, from what I’ve been reading/learning about queen rearing/breeding - this is how queens are most often massed produced for selling -- in five frame nuc boxes. Bees make queens when the hive is full and thriving and needs to split in order to survive. Restricted inside a functioning nuc box - with an active laying queen... the bees quickly assume they are running out of room and begin making new queens from the larvae the old queen is laying.
I think - when you buy a package of bees - you get bees that come from generations of bees that have been bred and used in this queen breeding process --- bees that are used to constantly having a full hive and constantly making new queens.
My theory is that this is why my bees immediately started trying to make a new queen even though they had a freshly bred, young, laying, healthy queen already. They were just doing the same job that bees in their family line were used to being manipulated into --- they didn’t really have a natural reason to start a new queen (they weren’t out of space yet - just beginning to get the five frames full). So they were sort of trained or primed to be queen rearers/makers immediately whenever they were in that small space.
Bottom line - I pinched those queen cells right off on day 7 - the first time I saw them (that was 3 weeks ago now).
When I pinched them off - I added more empty frames - giving the bees and their new queen a full size hive to work in. I am never sure about interfering with the bees -- which is partly why I am so keen on this “treatment-free” beekeeping stuff. But in this case, I am pretty sure I did the right thing by pinching off those extra unnecessary queen cells. Three weeks down the line - the hive is filling up and thriving, the queen and her brood and bees seem to be very healthy.
