rae
Field Bee
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2009
- Messages
- 826
- Reaction score
- 1
- Location
- Berkshire
- Hive Type
- 14x12
- Number of Hives
- 8 and 3 nucs...it's swarm time...
Regular forumites will know of our frenzied artificial swarming (and real swarming) earlier this year. In the space of two weeks, we went from two colonies to 8, spent a fortune in Thornes and started to worry about next year.
2 months later the story is mixed. The two original colonies are fine - ridiculously productive and I think we will be extracting (again) this weekend. Three of the splits are doing well, all on 9 frames of brood and have all been supered, and will need to be supered again next week end.
That leaves us with one split and two swarms. The split never managed to get its queen mated, and ended up with laying workers. The small swarm looked like it had brood, but as it was put in a nuc box with some broken frames (it was all we had), it was pretty hard to check. The big swarm got its queen mated and promptly got rid of her, choosing to raise new queen cells.
We merged the split with the small swarm (tipped the split out away from the hives, then separated with newspaper), and....nothing. If there is a queen in there, she's hiding both herself and the brood pretty well. The big swarm has raised its new queen....and she is a drone layer. Beautiful even pattern, all drone. All of the bees in these two colonies are now about 10+ weeks old.
I'm not going to merge either of these two colonies with the successful ones - I don't want to risk damaging good colonies. So the question is, how do you let colonies die off without causing trouble? I see two ideas:
1) Tip them onto the ground and remove the hive. The flying bees will make their way to the nearest hive and have to take their chances.
2) Wait until they've all died and remove the hive. I see this as a recipe for robbing, so it doesn't seem like a good idea.
2 months later the story is mixed. The two original colonies are fine - ridiculously productive and I think we will be extracting (again) this weekend. Three of the splits are doing well, all on 9 frames of brood and have all been supered, and will need to be supered again next week end.
That leaves us with one split and two swarms. The split never managed to get its queen mated, and ended up with laying workers. The small swarm looked like it had brood, but as it was put in a nuc box with some broken frames (it was all we had), it was pretty hard to check. The big swarm got its queen mated and promptly got rid of her, choosing to raise new queen cells.
We merged the split with the small swarm (tipped the split out away from the hives, then separated with newspaper), and....nothing. If there is a queen in there, she's hiding both herself and the brood pretty well. The big swarm has raised its new queen....and she is a drone layer. Beautiful even pattern, all drone. All of the bees in these two colonies are now about 10+ weeks old.
I'm not going to merge either of these two colonies with the successful ones - I don't want to risk damaging good colonies. So the question is, how do you let colonies die off without causing trouble? I see two ideas:
1) Tip them onto the ground and remove the hive. The flying bees will make their way to the nearest hive and have to take their chances.
2) Wait until they've all died and remove the hive. I see this as a recipe for robbing, so it doesn't seem like a good idea.