Advice please with combining & AS

[SimonB]

Hi,

I have 3 colonies (14x12), a carry over from my 2 last year when I didn't end up combining 2 of the colonies.

I don't have the kit or space to be able to AS all 3 possibly at once if circumstances dictate. I had planned to recombine the weaker 2 colonies which I had identified in my only inspection so far this year in March when we had a particularly warm day.

So on Tuesday I planned to complete my second inspection and do the combination. I initially went through all 3 to check for health, condition and any preparations for swarming. One of the earlier weaker colonies was now the strongest of the 3, and I found one capped Q cell and two cups with eggs. My conclusion, despite the location at the bottom of the frame, was that this was supercedure. Laying patter looked good and they had strengthened well, but this is a 2012 queen so perhaps she's starting to fade.

No QCs in the other two, but since I had changed my mind about which colonies would be combined and spent a while having a think about the best approach, as well double checked the strong colony for other QCs it got a little too cool I felt to go searching for a queen.

So since OSR is out around here I super'ed the strongest colony (with QC) and next strongest. The third only has bees on 6-7 frames, 3 frames of BIAS, so decided it wasn't strong enough yet.

Back to the drawing board though. I am away for a week on Wednesday which might dictate how I do this. What I am concerned about is being in the middle of combine when the colony may decide to prepare for swarming.

I think that I could probably disperse any brood frames in the top brood box into the lower brood box and the QC colony, rather than wait for brood to emerge which I understand is the usual approach.

I can then clear the top box, freeing it to perform an AS.

I am hoping that if the QC colony is supercedure then they will not be swarming this year, but not sure I can assume that, and not confirmed yet.

So I have two questions.

1. Does the above seem a reasonable plan?
2. I wanted to get the combine done before I go away - would you leave the top brood box on to give them space and perhaps delay swarming, but possibly fill with OSR, or get the top brood box off asap and super them instead. My fear is that the combination at this time might increase the risk of swarming as bee numbers have increased.

I am worrying over nothing, just get it done and see how it all works out, or is there a better approach to this that I am simply not seeing?

Thanks.

 

[enrico]

Your plan seems ok to me, if you have to combine to get the kit then you have to do it wether they swarm or not, if you haven't got the kit you can't do anything anyway so you have to free up some somehow.
I know what I would do, I would sell one colony, transferring into the buyers hive, that frees up one set of kit, gives you enough money to buy another set of kit and leaves you with the two colonies you wanted in the first place!
The most important lesson to learn is that you need to go into winter with the right amount of colonies. That means you have to get them sorted properly in the right amount of bb's I am a fine one to talk. I only wanted three this year and I have five......oh the drama!
E

 

[SimonB]

Thanks. Got it done, took a while to find the queen, but got there in the end.

Definitely looks like supercedure. New queen has emerged and all other queen cups are now empty.