Best way to optimise honey crop?

[Tomo]

Hi, I started the year with one healthy over-wintered colony. Carried out Bailey comb change which needed artificial swarm, this in turn swarmed (see AS swarmed post). Caught original queen and put her in spare hive. Position now is I have HM and small amount of flying bees in spare hive building slowly and two queenless hives (one large other medium all from original queen) waiting for single QC to emerge in each i.e. lots of bees with large potential. No supers filled yet as the OSR flow has been used to good effect in drawing out frames for all three hives. I want to end up with two full hives and one emptyas spare, with maximum honey crop (and no more swarms !).
What is the best way to proceed? Thanks.

 

[Heather]

Maybe give spare hive a little syrup to help the colony if low in flyers. Allow others to requeen.
Assess the situation when newly mated queens are laying well. Then see which is the weakest queen of the three, remove, and do newspaper rejoin of that (now queenless) hive on top of the smaller of the other two colonies.
That will return you to two.

 

[Tomo]

How long should I leave the two queenless hives before an inspection?

 

[Davelin]

You should have a good idea when your queen cells will hatch. Allow a couple of weeks for mating and then a bit more for her to get going. 3 weeks is about the time you look with fingers crossed and hope to see eggs. Wait until you are sure they are workers not drones and then combine.

 

[YorkshireBees]

The stark reality is that you can forget a spring crop as each hive has a greatly reduced workforce due to swarming / split and will not, in all reality, store a surplus amount of honey during the OSR flowering.
The 2 queenless hives now need 3 weeks before the Queen is mated and laying + the time for brood to start hatching so the population of those hives will reduce before they start building again.
The hive with the queen will again need a full brood cycle before it's population starts to increase.

So long as you manage them to enable them to expand as fast as they can you can hopefully build them up to strong colonies in time for a Summer / Autumn flow.

 

[Ely]

If you are concerned with optimising honey crop and do not want to wait nigh on a month for your queens to get going again you could buy in queens. Subject to availability that is. That is what I am doing when my hive needs an a/s. They are nasty tempered and need a requeen anyway. I will make sure there is a queen available to buy from a local supplier, keep knocking down queen cells until they cannot requeen on there own making them desperate for a queen and then requeen with the bought queen.

 

[Tomo]

My intention (which has worked so far) was for the large amount of OSR energy to be used to good effect in comb building. As it's my first year I don't want the added hassle of OSR honey extraction just yet. Only draw back so far is the AS that swarmed, so now I don't have a spare hive for AS if required. Due to the position of the prime swarm that left i.e. in the bottom of a twiggy bush, most of the bees were left free flying and went back (I think) to their original hive, as I had put Queeny and about two handfulls of bees into my spare hive.
As an emergency measure, if I had a cast to deal with, could I dump the swarmed bees into a spare super box minus frames, on top of newspaper on top of the spare hive with original queen? Bearing in mind the bees are all former colony sisters?

 

[Apple]

What is the best way to proceed?

Are the bees you would intend to dump atop newspaper to merge queenless?
just a couple of cups full of bees, it may work as a method of merging, you could perhaps give them a few super frames to hang onto as there work they way to merging.
The bee keeping dilemma, more kit!

James

 

[YorkshireBees]

My intention (which has worked so far) was for the large amount of OSR energy to be used to good effect in comb building. As it's my first year I don't want the added hassle of OSR honey extraction just yet. Only draw back so far is the AS that swarmed, so now I don't have a spare hive for AS if required. Due to the position of the prime swarm that left i.e. in the bottom of a twiggy bush, most of the bees were left free flying and went back (I think) to their original hive, as I had put Queeny and about two handfulls of bees into my spare hive.
As an emergency measure, if I had a cast to deal with, could I dump the swarmed bees into a spare super box minus frames, on top of newspaper on top of the spare hive with original queen? Bearing in mind the bees are all former colony sisters?

I would say extracting any honey is NEVER a hassle. It is such a shame that some beekeepers look down on OSR based honey.

Either you have very big hands or there are not enough bees to survive with the queen in that spare hive!! (Full size hive?)

Are you a member of your local BKA? You could really do with someone experienced to have a look and advise you locally.

 

[Tomo]

What I was referring to with regard to OSR honey extraction is the "hassle" of granulated honey going hard in the combs if super removal is not timed exactly, as mentioned by various other people on the forum.
I was using the model for OSR management as mentioned by Alan Campion in his excellent book "Bees at the bottom of the garden" and the chapter "living with rape".

 

[Heather]

And OSR honey sweet but not so tasty.
I would rather do without... patience produces the best honey. Harvest once...'him indoors' does notice EVERYWHERE gets sooooooooooo sticky then, so one hit job!