patl
New Bee
So, the background. I want to combine a nuc with another small hive and last Friday moved them into a brood box in preparation but while picking up the queen to kill her, managed to knock her off the frame (or so I thought as I thought I'd seen her fall from the frame and couldn't see her on any frame afterwards).
I went back today, expecting to find either the queen or queen cells and prep to unite this evening, why is it never that simple? Went through the frames umpteen times and couldn't find the queen or queen cells, I also see no eggs, only tiny larvae consistent with them being made queenless last Friday.
As there are no queen cells, they evidently think that they have a queen so the only options I see are:
1) shake off the bees and introduce the frames straight into the new hive. Remove the old hive and let the flying bees find homes where they can. The problem I foresee is that I'd be introducing 3 frames of brood into a hive that only has 4 brood frames, so I'd be worried they wouldn't have the resources, but then I'd guess there's only a total of about one side of a frame of unsealed brood, the rest is sealed, so maybe it isn't as important that the target hive doesn't have as many nurse bees.
2) Go ahead with the unite and rely on the queen excluder keeping the queens apart (if there is one in the donor hive)
I should add that I'm now out of brood boxes so my only other thought of moving the brood above a queen excluder, waiting for the nurse bees to follow then uniting the result is a non-starter.
Any suggestions?
I went back today, expecting to find either the queen or queen cells and prep to unite this evening, why is it never that simple? Went through the frames umpteen times and couldn't find the queen or queen cells, I also see no eggs, only tiny larvae consistent with them being made queenless last Friday.
As there are no queen cells, they evidently think that they have a queen so the only options I see are:
1) shake off the bees and introduce the frames straight into the new hive. Remove the old hive and let the flying bees find homes where they can. The problem I foresee is that I'd be introducing 3 frames of brood into a hive that only has 4 brood frames, so I'd be worried they wouldn't have the resources, but then I'd guess there's only a total of about one side of a frame of unsealed brood, the rest is sealed, so maybe it isn't as important that the target hive doesn't have as many nurse bees.
2) Go ahead with the unite and rely on the queen excluder keeping the queens apart (if there is one in the donor hive)
I should add that I'm now out of brood boxes so my only other thought of moving the brood above a queen excluder, waiting for the nurse bees to follow then uniting the result is a non-starter.
Any suggestions?