Laying worker

[snoop]

In one instance I combined the hives , one half of the Artificial Swarm queen hatched but never got mated , combined it back with the other half ( new laying queen here as well) , used newspapers & icing sugar .

Now both halves are queenless , they killed the laying queen

Second lot are on frame no 3 . still no queen cells being drawn . With all the rain & bad weather here the window of opportunity for getting queens mated is very tight.

 

[Finman]

.

Okay. If nothing works, shake bees and feed them.


I have not such problems.

But it is easy to loose queens if I am not carefull.

It depends....

- if the swarm has virgin, it is easy to change it to laying queen.
- if a swarm has laying queen, it s impossible to change it to virgin. Bees become mad.

- If bees start to make own queen,
a) they do not accept other queens.
b) they let the queen lay but the emerging queen will kill the queen

In August queen changing is difficult when they do not get food any more from flowers. Now in July everything works.

- to quarantee working I keep quite much spare queens.

If bees do not accept one queen, they may easily take another queen.
It is easy to give Carniolan queen into Italian hive.


Impossible to count how many queen I have lost during decades.

 

[John R]

I had issues with this and in the end I shook out the bees and they thankfully united witj my other 3 hives, there was a few bees that had a scrap, but nothing to worry about. I got to the point where i couldn't face seeing them dwindling away to nothing, and when down to 3 frames I'd had enough. Glad I shook them out as they have strengthened up my other colonies nicley

 

[snoop]

I know , but I had 4 of them in this situation the weather got bad and queens didn't mate. Just though I would try some thing different .
I am going to give them another week to see what happens & shake them out if they don't start to draw queen cells