Forward planning - queen replacement

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Ambodach

New Bee
Joined
May 30, 2011
Messages
41
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3
Location
Nr Edinburgh
Hive Type
National
Number of Hives
1
I have two hives, one works well but has a queen that should be passed her sell by date next spring, and the other has a younger queen but she's lazy, or she produces lazy bees, as the brood area is never well filled and I get about half the yield of the good hive.

How do I address this ? Both hives are easy to work bees so I am wary about buying in queens, and would prefer to force supercedure. Neither hive produced queen cells over the past two years.

Rob
 
But might leave it to next year as the old queen may supersede anyway! Some do in late summer.
E
 
Thanks guys - 'Demaree' is a term from somewhere in the dim and distant past; I think I know the principles but will have to do a googling, unless someone here wants to give a chapter and verse somewhere. If I dig deep enough I might even be able to find an old BK'ing book in the dusty archives of the attic !

Rob
 
Thanks for that, Tim - it was as I vaguely remembered. I do have a top board in my inherited stocks that has openable slots - I do seem to remember that one of my old books recommended that the entrance for the top hive should be on a different face.

What did throw me in your pdf document was the reference to 'seems of bees'. Google was no help on this at all until I changed that to 'seams of bees'; since when did the gap between frames become 'seams'? Certainly I can see that as a useful measure of the brood size, but I've never come across it before, though I can see now that looking down on the top of a wild hive could well look like seamed joints in material.

Rob
 
Ambodach ... spelling aside, David Cushman (and many others) refer to seams of bees, particularly when talking about treatment with oxalic acid. In my view it's only really meaningful when the bees are tightly clustered.
 
I have two hives, one works well but has a queen that should be passed her sell by date next spring, and the other has a younger queen but she's lazy, or she produces lazy bees, as the brood area is never well filled and I get about half the yield of the good hive.

How do I address this ? Both hives are easy to work bees so I am wary about buying in queens, and would prefer to force supercedure. Neither hive produced queen cells over the past two years.

Rob

is it old comb that is causing the lack of egg laying or is her pattern of eggs laying diploid
 
I to had a lazy Queen who I thought was on the way out.

She is now going great guns and laying up full frames since going on all new foundation during the A/S.
 

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