Balled Queen on inspection

Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum

Help Support Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Balling the queen. To rescue her drop ball of bees into bowl of water and fish her out. Reintroduce her back using fondant release cage. Doesn't always work!
 

Attachments

  • blue marked queen being balled 2016.jpg
    blue marked queen being balled 2016.jpg
    260.8 KB
Last edited:
That’s great.........how long to get the bowl of water.
 
Well, I was taught that the reasoning for inspecting the bottom brood box first and then the second brood box placed back on top of the first was to have less bees in the air. I did have a queen being balled in front of the hive earlier this spring. I took it she was a supersedure queen gone wrong as she looked like an intercaste queen. That is the second time I have seen an intercaste queen being rejected.
 
So what if you have looked in bottom box and she is not there, you put top box back on, and she runs down into bottom box? You cannot find her. Look through all 22 frames again.?
By intelligent use of crown boards you keep number of flying bees down.
Teaching is one thing, but I still prefer to think things through logically myself.
As is often said on here a lot of tosh is often passed on, without any thought.
 
Only if you need to find the queen and usually you don’t
:iagree:
there seems to be this obsession with finding the queen at each and every inspection - it's why inspections all take so long which is to the detriment of colony wellbeing.
there are plenty of indicators as to the presence of the queen without actually seeing her.
 
So what if you have looked in bottom box and she is not there, you put top box back on, and she runs down into bottom box?

No - by 'intelligent use of a crownboard' you inspect the top box before replacing it
 
I think that is what I was saying in post 17. I meant using a crown board to cut down number of flying bees as per Beeno.
I only look for queen if I need to find her as in an AS etc.
 
It cannot be taken for granted that having separated the two brood boxes that the "unsettled" bees do not have the queen.

Whilst dealing with my hive from hell last season I was determined to find the witch and kill her. One box was "calm" (using the term VERY loosely) and the other was very upset.

After going through the calm lot and being repeatedly stung three times, I went through the unsettled half which obviously didn't have the queen and of course, there she was.

Never say never with bees.

PH
 

Latest posts

Back
Top