3 queens only wanted

[hedgerow pete]

well with work being a pain and every thing else going wrong I have ended up with a queen breeding session that has given me 18 AMM crosses and boy are these girls evil,

so i have had to squash the first 15 but now i need three new ones for the hives i have had to requeen

does anyone have 3 queens on the go, or will be soon ish, must be mated and in lay, i will collect or pay postage and queens price.

 

[Norton]

Um HMMMMMMM!

 

[Tom Bick]

Not wanting to sound stupid but you have bread 18 queens, and to test them you had them in nucs, so you have combined them back down to three hives and you are now looking to re queen the three hives.

 

[hedgerow pete]

no, i bred a batch of 20 queens and had 18 come through and mate, three went straight away into the needed hives and the other fifteen were caged and put into a holding hive for two weeks whilst i got the nucs and nuc areas ready.

now even though i managed to flood the area with drones, a complete hive just for drone breeding it was not enough and within two weeks all three hives went bad on me.

now when you are deeling with AMM, when you get a bad cross , my god dont they go bad quick and hard.

now what i have is three hives with the most evil of bees going, and of course its all my fault, the wasp problem just makes it worse.

 

[Tom Bick]

Ok so you decided best not to try the other 15 queens, good look with sorting the hives.

 

[hedgerow pete]

mate when you have an AMM cross you DONT want to try any others, lol

i have delt with some bad bees over the years but this lot are realy bad. i suppose i could always try the second breeding/cross as they normaly are very very gentle, but knowing my luck!!!!!

 

[keith pierce]

how can they go bad on you within two weeks.

It takes 3 weeks for a worker to hatch.
it then take about another 3 weeks before they become guards bees, so that would be 6 weeks minimum, before you should see any slight reaction.
and the the reaction would be only slight as she would only start to gradulally .
The maths dont add up.
I never judge a new queen till it has gone through the winter and got rid of all of the old queens workers.

 

[sawdstmakr]

I'll second that Keith.

 

[hedgerow pete]

i went from three reasonable behaved hives to three that would empty out onto the face veil and follow for well over 300 yards there were the odd one that would still keep coming after that.

30 plus stings per leather glove and more in the veil peice, next to imposible to work the hive or to inspect it.

they were burnt out by the farmers son because they attacted the tractor he was in as it drove past

belive me i was better off with out them

 

[Poly Hive]

Sorry guys but rubbish.

Arithmetic has nothing in it.

Forget the maths.

Remember instead the pheremones.

A crap colony will sing sweetly after a couple of days with a re-queen...............

The converse sdly holds true.

The man knows what he is saying and I endorse it.

PH

 

[oliver90owner]

with PH.

Changing a queen can have a rapid result.

I thought otherwise when I first started and was pleasantly surprised that what I was told by an experienced beek was spot on.

Regards, RAB

 

[bees4u]

Can i just say that leather gloves makes bees mad anyway! How can you feel if you are crushing a bee wear those gloves, change to Marigolds and your bees will settle down.
At least you can wash rubber gloves & at 99p. Leather gets harder with use

 

[ElectricBlueBee]

Sorry to go off track but i'd feel guilty making a new post but this seemed a likely one.

With queen rearing, what do you do with all those queens? Do people manage to sell them all, or use them. I can't get my head around having many queens available.

 

[madasafish]

Sorry to go off track but i'd feel guilty making a new post but this seemed a likely one.

With queen rearing, what do you do with all those queens? Do people manage to sell them all, or use them. I can't get my head around having many queens available.

About half the local beekeepers I have spoken to in the last week have lost at least one queen since April... so lots of demand for queens...

 

[Hombre]

@ElectricBlueBee

The point of having a supply of mated queens is thus:

If you have to split a colony as part of swarm management, then the part without a queen will effectively cease producing honey. The time to get back into production is the time for the a new queen to emerge. Nominally twelve days assuming that you split the colony two days before the cell was sealed. Two to three days to mature and a further couple of weeks to become mated and begin laying (or more). Three weeks for the eggs to become workers and a further three weeks for those workers to become foragers.

By replacing that cell with a mated queen introduction, after having made them hopelessly queenless, then the break in brood rearing is minimal rather than a month, in which time the colony will be reducing and so it's rearing capacity diminishing, albeit slowly.

So the secret of production is to have big colonies with plenty of room (supers) and fresh laying queens that have lots of queen substance to hold the colony together and not allow them to swarm. The other point of course is that these are queens raised from queens with the traits that you want and not swarmy queens or just random outcomes.

The buffer mechanism is mating mini nucs to establish mated queens for short term use to fill a shortfall in queens and to replace older failing queens, nucs to grow backup colonies that can be used for colony increase , sale or bolstering colonies that need frames of emerging brood to maintain the production work force.

It all seems to be a bit of a catch 22 question at times trying to get the balance right as the seasons and the world flash by before you, but that's the theory as I understand it.

The idea is to keep your honey factories fully manned (girled) and motivated, if you can.

Easier said than done at times.

 

[ElectricBlueBee]

Thank you Makes sense!

 

[hedgerow pete]

what normaly happens is i set out to breed 25 new queens at a time, then the laws of averages kick in,

so out of a posible 25 i had 18 produced, i needed desparately 4 any way due to being queen less or just bad tempered, so the 4 biggest went to existing hives, that left me 14

i then made up 10 small three frame nucs and then added two plain frames to make them five frame nucs, the smallest grotty looking 4 were squished

out of those ten 7 mated and started laying the other three were lost so those three nucs were split up and added to the 7 left, then those 7 plus the 4 installed in the big hives just went mental, so what i ended up with is 7 dead (squished) queens, one dab hive and three burnt out by the farmers son hives/ashes

 

[bellabee]

Dear hedgerow pete

What happened next...

Did it get sorted?