AS on strong hive

[JonnyPicklechin]

Very strong hive, brood and a half, 2 supers, filled with sealed brood, manipulated weekly to make space-

Weekly inspection - found two half filled QCs, destroyed one. Huffed and prepared AS. I resigned to not finding queen after one look so moved hive 6 feet and replaced with new stand and box.

Started adding some decent brood comb, BIAS and open with intent to have 5 combs and replace original box with some drawn and fresh. On third frame check for queen, saw her loping (clearly mated) and press-on-caged her.

Decided to switch tactics and replace original hive with 1 x QC to old site and now 6 frames of BIAS and various brood and stores to new box at the 6 feet site with HM doing her thing.

Next plan to check stores on queenrite but let them get on with it for a week.
Check both hives in 6 days, tear down all other QCs in queenless except that nice one from today.

Questions:
How did I do?
Can I bring the two close together after a week and then let some flyers elect the queened hive?
What else?

JP

 

[Millet]

That all sounds wrong to me..what where you aiming to achieve..

 

[JonnyPicklechin]

That all sounds wrong to me..what where you aiming to achieve..

Separating the queen and some brood (now in new location) from the flying bees and most of the brood (staying in the original location) thus creating an artificial swarm.

 

[Murox]

A man with a plan, great. How far apart are the two now? Some flyers will go to old site anyway unless new site is far away from old flight paths. I might have left both queen cells at this stage and made a choice once they were capped. If their traits are good I might consider making up a nucleus with the other queen cell.

How are the bees from hell doing ?

 

[drex]

It will likely do the job, but suggest you read up on Pagden AS, which is what I first used. Many ways to achieve same result. My preferred way is now snelgrove 2 modified as per Wally Shaw.

 

[Beefriendly]

If you are doing a pagden you really want queen and flying bees on original site and queen cells/frames with brood/ and nurse bees in a different position.
As Millet says you appear to have done it wrong way round....easy enough mistake under pressure.......and very easy to rectify. Just swap the positions of the current brood boxes. The flying bees will migrate to original position with queen.

 

[Millet]

Separating the queen and some brood (now in new location) from the flying bees and most of the brood (staying in the original location) thus creating an artificial swarm.

It sound back to front to me and i am not having a dig.. iam just trying to understand what type of artificial swarm you are performing.. one other thing the Queen is obviously mated as she has produced all your brood so there is no need for a push in cage..good luck..

 

[JonnyPicklechin]

Cheers all.

interesting responses. I did mull over doing it the Pagden way but figured I had already performed a NUC method twice in the season so carried on.

Whats the logic here then? Murox and Drex seem Ok with it but Millet and BF, not.

With the way I have done it I surely must avoid a swarm as the queen is now in a small population with room to lay but not much to swarm with and certainly no QCs to issue the urge. Presumably what might happen next.....?

 

[JonnyPicklechin]

It sound back to front to me and i am not having a dig.. iam just trying to understand what type of artificial swarm you are performing.. one other thing the Queen is obviously mated as she has produced all your brood so there is no need for a push in cage..good luck..

Not at all Steve. Exactly why I am checking with the "beekarati" sir. My logic was that I have already performed find-queen-move-her twice already this season. I stuck with it when I found her. Moving the hive with the queen and brood and leaving the flyers is much easier as you dont need to find the queen. I suppose I was celebrating actually finding her.

Oh and the cage was only used whilst I made the manipulations. I released her when I was ready to close up.

 

[JonnyPicklechin]

How are the bees from hell doing ?

Its still pingy down there with full inspections and I am not sure if I have other ones with problems or that the hellhive just responds to nearby activity. I must be honest and admit I have not opened the hive in question for 10 days now. I kind of figured it wont be for swarming (probably wrong) but I have workmen in the garden fitting one of those garden lodges up for water and leccy and I daren't risk the HfH's wrath and make it tough on 'em.

I was actually going to look at it today but the weather here has been on and off and I had all the other hives to sort. Unfortunately I still dither about when inspecting and there has been so many swarm warnings through the last 4 weeks its been mad. I spent so much time on the hell hive it completely disrupted inspections of the others because I had to limit activity. Been tough...

Thanks for asking though mate.

 

[enrico]

You have done nothing wrong but you haven't necessarily done it the way that some of us would.
To replicate a swarm and therefore mimic it to the best of the pagden method you need the old queen in a new hive on the old site and the new queen in the old hive on a new site. Queen and flyers together but on brood and fresh frames.
The way you have done it will mean that you will get old bees on the old site with no queen and therefore they will go into overdrive with queen cells. The old queen is now left with few flyers so there will be a hiccup in honey production. However, it will all come right as long as you stay on top of the queen cells.
Sometimes it is hard to think on your feet when you suddenly find the queen when you didn't expect to. The other day I picked a frame out with a juicy sealed queen cell and the queen. Threw me for a few seconds!!!
E

 

[JonnyPicklechin]

You have done nothing wrong but you haven't necessarily done it the way that some of us would.
To replicate a swarm and therefore mimic it to the best of the pagden method you need the old queen in a new hive on the old site and the new queen in the old hive on a new site. Queen and flyers together but on brood and fresh frames.
The way you have done it will mean that you will get old bees on the old site with no queen and therefore they will go into overdrive with queen cells. The old queen is now left with few flyers so there will be a hiccup in honey production. However, it will all come right as long as you stay on top of the queen cells.
Sometimes it is hard to think on your feet when you suddenly find the queen when you didn't expect to. The other day I picked a frame out with a juicy sealed queen cell and the queen. Threw me for a few seconds!!!
E

Cheers Eric-

I am starting to get an idea of some of the logic now. So for Pagden you still need to find the queen because even though she is staying in the same location (and therefore with the flyers) the key is the new box with fresh frames for her to lay in. The "remainers" focus on more brood, there is now plenty of room, the swarm urge extinguished. Get that.

Moving over to the new site, this one crucially has almost all of the brood, eggs etc and nurse bees. So assume new young bees emerge and most will become flyers and are focused on quickly creating a foraging force. This emergence, along with the appearance of the new VQ, means that queen cells are not produced "drastically" as the primary colony issue is not the queen, as they are already aware of the created QCs and are therefore easier to watch and manage from the queen-control perspective. Also efforts in this hive focus on the flyers, and hive stability in that particular area, rather than the "concern" over no-queen. Its a steadier evolution of the adaption to colony change, in other words, created by the beekeepers manipulation?

 

[Beefriendly]

.

Whats the logic here then? Murox and Drex seem Ok with it but Millet and BF, not.

You now have a queenless hive with the older flying bees and larvae and eggs to derive new queens from. Some will revert back to "nurse bees" to produce brood food for queen cells and probably won't make "good" queens... so you will need to keep on top ( and destroy) the ones they almost certainly will draw and make sure the original queen cell already in there is the only one that emerges. You have probably created quite a lot of work for yourself, that's all.
If they are determined to swarm then whatever you do won't stop them....short of killing the queen....which is a method I have employed on occasions....now that works

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

another nit to pick....
As others have said - queen should be in the new position - QC and nurse bees in original - but I wouldn't have left the queen on so much brood -one frame maximum (some say none) would have been better

 

[Beefriendly]

another nit to pick....
As others have said - queen should be in the new position - QC and nurse bees in original - but I wouldn't have left the queen on so much brood -one frame maximum (some say none) would have been better

What's the name of this new swarm control method you appear to have invented?

 

[Swarm]

More than one approach to swarm prevention and none are guaranteed to work.
Remove the queen and set her up in a nuc, leaving the colony to sort itself out is a method that I've found works quite well. Choose your QC, mark the frame and remove any others, you'd do this with a Pagden anyway.
Your queen will quickly build up as she is already laying, your large colony has a good workforce of nurse bees and foragers and more nurse bees to come as all the capped brood emerges.

 

[drex]

All you have really done is a split not an AS. Others have already said how to do a traditional Pagden. You seem bothered about finding the queen. In the modified snelgrove 2 I mentioned you do not have to find her until second manipulation, when all the fliers have deserted her, hence she is easier to spot

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

What's the name of this new swarm control method you appear to have invented?

OOPs - typing whilst distracted, Queen in original position on foundation to receive flying bees - nurse bees and brood in new position

 

[mjt68]

I thought taking a queenright nuc was a perfectly legitimate method of swarm control. Bonus of being a bit (lot) easier than a Pagden and only needing a spare nuc. Trick is to reduce QCs to one when you go back to the queenless side.

I think what you've done might work but I would have taken queen and one brood frame (removing QCs), one stores frame and 2 frames-worth of bees into a nuc of empty comb or foundation. This leaves more workforce in the original to gather honey during brood break and leaves the queen in a more swarm-like environment.

 

[Millet]

More than one approach to swarm prevention and none are guaranteed to work.
Remove the queen and set her up in a nuc, leaving the colony to sort itself out is a method that I've found works quite well. Choose your QC, mark the frame and remove any others, you'd do this with a Pagden anyway.
Your queen will quickly build up as she is already laying, your large colony has a good workforce of nurse bees and foragers and more nurse bees to come as all the capped brood emerges.

I may give that method a go if the need arises which i am sure it will..