Carried out a demaree on a hive a week ago as there were charged queen cells in the brood box. Inspected the top box today expecting to find lots of queen cells as there was lots of very young brood and eggs when we moved them to the top and there was not one! This seemed very strange to me as they had been separated from the queen by 3 supers, and the queen was happily laying in the newly drawn comb in the bottom box. Any ideas?
No queen cells!
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enrico
Queen Bee
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A virgin already in there?
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bees don't always make QCs in the top box. But in this case you were lucky they didn't as they would have swarmed on them.
As an aside - you were very lucky to get away with doing a Demaree after finding QCs as it's a preemptive not reactive manipulation, usually if they've already made preparations they'd be off regardles
As an aside - you were very lucky to get away with doing a Demaree after finding QCs as it's a preemptive not reactive manipulation, usually if they've already made preparations they'd be off regardles
I think that highly unlikely as the demaree was carried out at the very first sign that they were starting to charge cells. There had been no capped queen cells.
They were only just starting to charge cells, not capped queen cells, and in your own “sticky” on demaree you say this is the time to carry out the demaree.
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you need to read it again then.
