Pollen
New Bee
- Joined
- May 5, 2015
- Messages
- 21
- Reaction score
- 0
- Location
- Sussex/Surrey
- Hive Type
- National
- Number of Hives
- 6
[edit] I've just noticed that the title is a bit misleading - it should say something more like 'newly hived swarm'
I'm sure this is standard knowledge, but I can't find anything that gives an absolute answer. If a queen cell has royal jelly in it, is it definitely going to contain an egg/larva? My understanding is that a queen cell is made, then layed in and then royal jelly put in - as imitated in grafting - but in a queenless colony without brood would they start filling one hoping for the best? I know queenless ones can do funny things.
The reason I ask is that I hived our first swarm in the new university apiary on Sunday and there was a reasonably nice looking, marked queen (green, so most likely 1 year old) with them. I stuck a queen excluder underneath just to prevent absconding, as the chap who gave us the swarm had kept them in the poly nuc for a couple of days and had had a couple of others disappear that week so I took his advice to take no chances.
Today, I was going to just quickly whip out the queen excluder when a bunch of nearby students saw me with veil and smoker and came over to watch, so I offered 4 of them some suits (and one watched over the fence) and did a slightly longer inspection to show them what it was all about. As I'd found the queen so easily before with her bright green dot, I thought I'd point her out to the new guys. We didn't see a queen anywhere (I only checked the middle drawn out frames), but instead found some queen cells (in the middle of a frame), at least one of which had a good dollop of royal jelly in it. I hadn't seen any eggs anywhere on the frame, but once I had seen the queen cells I forgot to keep checking that frame as I was trying to explain the situation to the others and answer their questions about bees at the same time as thinking through the problem, which was quite difficult; I also didn't think to look closely at the pale whitish blob I'd seen in the cell to check whether it had an egg or larva in it. One of them suggested looking around for a dead queen, but I said that the workers would have taken her out of the hive somewhere if she had died, forgetting that there was an excluder in the way. What that means though is that she must still have been in the hive somewhere, though as there were a lot of bees on the excluder, she might have been in the load I shook off into the hive again either dead or alive.
Anyway, my plan is to check again in a couple of days for the original queen again and to see how the QCs are developing (I only saw royal jelly in one of them, but I didn't think to look right inside the others). If there's no queen and no egg or larva or development of the QC, I'll open the hive that we filled yesterday with another very strong swarm (6 frames of bees and more in the box, and drawing out comb rapidly) and hope that there's a frame with some eggs that I can transfer in. If that doesn't work, I'll probably go and look for a queen for sale. Any thoughts on that? And my original question about the possibility of royal jelly in eggless cells?
Thanks in advance - you've all been very helpful with my questions so far; I'm looking forward to being able to be on the other end of questions in a few years' time!
I'm sure this is standard knowledge, but I can't find anything that gives an absolute answer. If a queen cell has royal jelly in it, is it definitely going to contain an egg/larva? My understanding is that a queen cell is made, then layed in and then royal jelly put in - as imitated in grafting - but in a queenless colony without brood would they start filling one hoping for the best? I know queenless ones can do funny things.
The reason I ask is that I hived our first swarm in the new university apiary on Sunday and there was a reasonably nice looking, marked queen (green, so most likely 1 year old) with them. I stuck a queen excluder underneath just to prevent absconding, as the chap who gave us the swarm had kept them in the poly nuc for a couple of days and had had a couple of others disappear that week so I took his advice to take no chances.
Today, I was going to just quickly whip out the queen excluder when a bunch of nearby students saw me with veil and smoker and came over to watch, so I offered 4 of them some suits (and one watched over the fence) and did a slightly longer inspection to show them what it was all about. As I'd found the queen so easily before with her bright green dot, I thought I'd point her out to the new guys. We didn't see a queen anywhere (I only checked the middle drawn out frames), but instead found some queen cells (in the middle of a frame), at least one of which had a good dollop of royal jelly in it. I hadn't seen any eggs anywhere on the frame, but once I had seen the queen cells I forgot to keep checking that frame as I was trying to explain the situation to the others and answer their questions about bees at the same time as thinking through the problem, which was quite difficult; I also didn't think to look closely at the pale whitish blob I'd seen in the cell to check whether it had an egg or larva in it. One of them suggested looking around for a dead queen, but I said that the workers would have taken her out of the hive somewhere if she had died, forgetting that there was an excluder in the way. What that means though is that she must still have been in the hive somewhere, though as there were a lot of bees on the excluder, she might have been in the load I shook off into the hive again either dead or alive.
Anyway, my plan is to check again in a couple of days for the original queen again and to see how the QCs are developing (I only saw royal jelly in one of them, but I didn't think to look right inside the others). If there's no queen and no egg or larva or development of the QC, I'll open the hive that we filled yesterday with another very strong swarm (6 frames of bees and more in the box, and drawing out comb rapidly) and hope that there's a frame with some eggs that I can transfer in. If that doesn't work, I'll probably go and look for a queen for sale. Any thoughts on that? And my original question about the possibility of royal jelly in eggless cells?
Thanks in advance - you've all been very helpful with my questions so far; I'm looking forward to being able to be on the other end of questions in a few years' time!
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