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  1. sugarbush

    What turns bees nasty

    Queenlessness will make them grumpy. Think of it from their perspective, they are trying to survive, make a new queen, and some intruder comes in jeopardizing those efforts.
  2. sugarbush

    is it supersedure?

    I would have left them alone after the June 17th inspection. My observation is that there is far too much of a focus on swarm prevention and regular, in depth, hive inspections. Every time you go through a hive you are risking injury to the queen and disrupting their normal activity. If you...
  3. sugarbush

    What to do...keep Queen cells, destroy or other?

    Yeah thinking about your landscape vs ours I would think you should be able to out produce us, we are 90% forested. I put hives on old logging sites because that is where the best production comes from. Brambles, dandelion and golden rod thrive in logged off forests.
  4. sugarbush

    Newbie: can I expect any honey this year?

    Now that is quite a shift in philosophy.
  5. sugarbush

    What to do...keep Queen cells, destroy or other?

    Yes, but low or no production is a much easier problem to fix than dead is. I did a search and reviewed some of the honey production threads to see what average production is over there. The bulk of post look exceptionally low compared to what I am used to. In an average year my hives will make...
  6. sugarbush

    What to do...keep Queen cells, destroy or other?

    I never saw a dead bee make honey.
  7. sugarbush

    What to do...keep Queen cells, destroy or other?

    Why interfere with a system that has ensured their survival for the last 100 million years? Honey bees did not start having problems until man intervened. Supersedure is the bees selecting a few larva, developing them into queens and letting the strongest win out over the others and go on to...
  8. sugarbush

    What to do...keep Queen cells, destroy or other?

    Yes and the method closely mirrors the methods that Brother Adam wrote about for wintering queens in nucs. I don't believe that the two methods geographically evolved in separate areas of the world. I think somebody, (arguably Charles Mraz) learned it from Bro Adam and modified it to serve our...
  9. sugarbush

    What to do...keep Queen cells, destroy or other?

    My over wintered nucs produce honey in their first season after being wintered. Mine from last winter are now on 3 deeps and a medium and I have pulled 80 lbs of spring honey off, plus they have been split into nucs to winter this season. I don't know how tall you like to get hives, but I keep...
  10. sugarbush

    What to do...keep Queen cells, destroy or other?

    I track my queens life span just as well as you. They get split in May, the old queen goes into the split, the splits get requeened in August, the splits get wintered as nucs and split in May the following season. If it's a wintered production hive its queen is one year old in May, if its a...
  11. sugarbush

    What to do...keep Queen cells, destroy or other?

    Most of my queens go unmarked, but when a person isn't managing 100 of hives, you can tell by the change in activity if they swarm. This time of year there are always clusters of bees at the entrance, that will suddenly change post a swarm.
  12. sugarbush

    What to do...keep Queen cells, destroy or other?

    Your bees must be swarmier than ours. I read though these threads and have no idea why you guys are so anal retentive about swarm control. I haven't had a hive swarm in at least 5-6 years. Sure they build practice cells, prime some of then and rip them down all the time, but I split early in the...
  13. sugarbush

    What to do...keep Queen cells, destroy or other?

    Aspirate out the royal jelly of the excess cells and freeze it to use to prime grafts later on.
  14. sugarbush

    Brood boxes full of honey

    Thanks Finman for this. I mentioned in another thread that I don't use excluders and that i don't know any commercial keepers who do.... And basically was told that I was making ridiculous statements and colonies without excluders can't possibly exist and not have brood everywhere. I...
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