One day after uniting two hives

[Gardenbees]

I united two hives over the weekend - putting a smallish but good colony with a 2011 queen over a medium-strong colony which had a 2009 queen. The Q+ box (the top one) is a 14x12 bb, the older one below is a BS box which I want to empty. I united them in the traditional way with a sheet of paper. I made a few pinprick holes in the paper, although I'm never sure that this is really necessary. It was plain, brown packing paper (newspaper is more traditional, but I never like the thought of them chewing on all that ink). I left the varroa board in overnight to catch the fallout.

I went to have a look yesterday, and sure enough, there was a thick layer of fluffed-up, chewed brown paper on the board - so neatly done that I took a picture! Quite a few woodlice and earwigs, some of them in bits, were amongst the fluff, but no varroa following treatment, which is gratifying. No sign of dead bee bits either, so presumably they didn't fight too much.

The bees were foraging bravely this morning despite the gales, and appear to be quite settled.

PS - oops, need to change my details to "two colonies" now... it alls seems a far cry from the bustling 3 colonies and 2 nucs earlier this year....

 

[Bob Bee]

great pictures thanks. Did you leave both queens in or remove one.

 

[Gardenbees]

Ta!
I removed the older queen using a "butterfly clip" (which she promptly wriggled out of, but that's another story). You can leave them both in to tough it out, but only if you don't care which one to keep and/or can't catch either of them. Then there's a danger that you could be left with a partly injured queen which the bees will try to supercede anyway, and it's getting a bit late for that.

I specifically wanted to keep the 2011 queen - the older one has been great, but her brood pattern was getting patchy and one or two cells had clear signs of sacbrood, which in the absence of other factors tends to point to the queen as the main problem. It's not the end of the world, but I won't tolerate sacbrood - so that queen would have had to go in any case.

 

[For want of a better word]

great pictures thanks. Did you leave both queens in or remove one.

I united two hives over the weekend - putting a smallish but good colony with a 2011 queen over a medium-strong colony which had a 2009 queen. The Q+ box (the top one)

presume top box had a 2011 Q as Q+...and bottom 2009 Q squished ?

 

[Gardenbees]

I united two hives over the weekend - putting a smallish but good colony with a 2011 queen over a medium-strong colony which had a 2009 queen. The Q+ box (the top one)

presume top box had a 2011 Q as Q+...and bottom 2009 Q squished ?

Yeees... you would think that, but she nipped orf from out between the supposedly queenproof bars of the butterfly clip, dropped onto the decking, and promptly got hit by two wasps before I could do anything about it! So "squished" isn't strictly accurate!

 

[drstitson]

i presume you kept the corpse for bait hive duties next year?

Yeees... you would think that, but she nipped orf from out between the supposedly queenproof bars of the butterfly clip, dropped onto the decking, and promptly got hit by two wasps before I could do anything about it! So "squished" isn't strictly accurate!

 

[drstitson]

BTW always sensible to check the butterfly clip before use as the springs are very weak and the tails easily slip out.

Yeees... you would think that, but she nipped orf from out between the supposedly queenproof bars of the butterfly clip, dropped onto the decking, and promptly got hit by two wasps before I could do anything about it! So "squished" isn't strictly accurate!

 

[enrico]

Blimey I've never seen so much chewed paper. they normally chew a small hole and stop in my hives. I then take it out the following day, but I do use the Telegraph so maybe they are reading it instead of chewing it!
E

 

[Gardenbees]

Blimey I've never seen so much chewed paper. they normally chew a small hole and stop in my hives. I then take it out the following day, but I do use the Telegraph so maybe they are reading it instead of chewing it!
E

Well, they are royalists, I guess!!

Actually I didn't keep the queen's body; I already have one (so to speak...) and the wasps made off with this one fairly quickly. I'm surprised they managed to overpower her so easily, but then there were two of them.

I've not had any problems with a butterfly clip before; I find them useful, but as Dr S points out, they have a rather feeble closing mechanism.

 

[Bob Bee]

BTW always sensible to check the butterfly clip before use as the springs are very weak and the tails easily slip out.

whats your preference ?

 

[drstitson]

not had to use anything like that yet (mark with crown of thorns).

our assoc attempt at taranov failed in the spring due to dodgy hairclip - HM escaped under hive and presumably died there.

 

[Gardenbees]

I quite like the butterfly/hairgrip things because they're so easy to use with one hand, and quite gentle. Too gentle, perhaps! I don't use it to mark her, though: just to pick up queens and/or isolate them, eg. if I'm doing anything drastic with the brood box and want to be absolutely sure she's not going to fly off or get damaged. It's also useful for scooping up a Q and some helpers to keep her out of the way whilst I''m doing a split. Doesn't happen very often but it's nice to have a clip to hand just in case.

 

[ROACHMAN]

Im a bit confused with uniting.

Why dont the bees that have had their BB moved fly back to the original site of the BB ?

 

[Hebeegeebee]

Im a bit confused with uniting.

Why dont the bees that have had their BB moved fly back to the original site of the BB ?

Some will. it is usual to bring the two hives close together so any flyers that can't find their old home go into the new one as it's close by.

 

[Gardenbees]

Im a bit confused with uniting.

Why dont the bees that have had their BB moved fly back to the original site of the BB ?

Usually the two bbs will be moved together some time prior to uniting. In my case, they were about 2m apart in the same apiary. I moved the older colony closer to the target hive in two goes, leaving them a week in between. Last Saturday they had been a foot or so away from each other for just over a week, and were all returning to roughly the same place.

You could also try uniting a colony from a completely different site, but personally I'd still let them get used to the new site in their own hive for a bit (next to the target hive) before putting the two together.

I had a look at them today, and they're foraging happily on Himalayan balsam and seem completely integrated. So it doesn't take very long provided conditions are good.

Btw, some strains of bee are reputed to be better at orienting themselves than others; Buckfast types are supposed to be good at it, and I've certainly found that to be the case. I once moved a hive about 10m - a really inconvenient distance for bees but I had no choice. I put some brushwood and leafy branches in front of the entrance. Hardly any drifters returned to the old site, as far as I could tell.

 

[susbees]

Im a bit confused with uniting.

Why dont the bees that have had their BB moved fly back to the original site of the BB ?

Part of the theory is that they take a couple of days to get through the paper and the throng underneath. If they then go home and there's nothing there they will beg their way in somewhere else.

I did an experiment earlier this year combining each of two commercials with the two commercials on the next stand maybe twenty feet away and replacing the removed boxes with a commercial nuc with a couple of empty drawn frames in it slightly further up the field. Two frames of bees slowly drifted back to the box. I queened it and it's now a reasonable sized nuc. So not a major exodus given the option of living in a big queenright colony.

 

[weathercock]

Hmm...my experience a few days ago of uniting 2 hives was not so successful. I've never done it before. Had a weak, queenless colony which I thought might struggle through the winter after it swarmed a few weeks ago [my negligence, but you learn by your mistakes...] I moved it gradually next to a good colony and placed the BB on top of the strong colony separated by a single sheet of newspaper with a few short knife slashes in it. Result - carnage and hundreds of bodies outside the entrance. Should I have left the paper intact and let the introduction be slower? I'll use thicker paper next time, I think.

 

[ROACHMAN]

Sorry to go slightly off topic but

Someone I know raised some queens by using poly mini nucs, they added a sealed queen cell and a cup full of bees to each nuc. The queen then hatched and was mated.

How do you stop the bees going back to their parent hive when they are first introduced??

 

[Gardenbees]

Should I have left the paper intact and let the introduction be slower? I'll use thicker paper next time, I think.

yes, I think the slashes in the paper were the problem: bees would just go straight through and weigh into the "foreign" colony before their smells had a chance to mingle. Thin paper is fine, but the most you need in terms of holes is tiny (literal) pinpricks. And actually I don't think you really need that; I did this time because the brown paper was fairly thick, but they would probably have chewed through it quickly enough in any case. I probably won't bother next time.

Re. the bees returning from mating nucs: the bees in the nucs are taken from in-house workers which haven't started venturing out yet. You would usually give the "donor" frame a gentle shake to dislodge older, flying bees, and then take a cupful of house bees to put into the nuc to look after the new queen. They don't fly back because they haven't actually started to fly at all.

 

[beebreeder]

Someone I know raised some queens by using poly mini nucs, they added a sealed queen cell and a cup full of bees to each nuc. The queen then hatched and was mated.

How do you stop the bees going back to their parent hive when they are first introduced??



Take them from one site to another in the evening, that way they re-orientate the next morning, some people keep them in a cool dark place shut in for three days before release, it helps them become their own colony c/w new queen