Apr 3, 2020
My new queenless hive has a bunch of queen cups. Good Girls. You know what to do!
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My new queenless hive has a bunch of queen cups. Good Girls. You know what to do!
2017-01-23 A lonely queen cell is testimony perhaps to the chronic devastation of the hive by wasps... Other queen cells never hatched, perhaps due to the cold as the nurse bees were losing the war.
Hive 3 is getting pretty full, with about 6 frames that look like this...
A frame from Hive 3 showing hatched queen cells and some drone comb, signs of making a new queen..
Making of a Queen
Making of a Queen
Queen bee in her bee cage with attendants, plugged with a sugar cube
Beekeeping is a fascinating hobby, but by far the creation of a queen bee is the most interesting aspect. You can buy a mated queen from a commercial operation that produces queens – mating them either naturally or inseminating them- or your hive will take things into their own “claws” and make their own. The cage above that I…
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Yesterday we united two colonies, however it wasn’t a classic method due to the fact we were uniting a colony from an incompatible smith hive into a commercial hive. The colony in the Smith was queenless, and was the one we were moving to the queen right colony. Firstly Patrick adapted a commercial eke to take smith frames, in order to get around the incompatibility. We then moved the smith to one side and put our new box in place using a queen excluder as a floor and propping the front of the box up with wood to fashion an entrance (top left photo). We started to transfer the frames, shaking the bees off into the new box (top right and middle left photos). The reason for this was to identify and remove any queen cells (middle right photo). Once all the frames were transferred we closed the new box up to let the flying bees return and settle down (bottom photos). The plan being to come back later in the evening to carry out the uniting procedure when the bees stopped flying.
Queen cells (in cell protectors) out of the incubator and ready for the mating nucs