Panic - advice please!

Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum

Help Support Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Juststarting

House Bee
Joined
Sep 3, 2009
Messages
293
Reaction score
0
Location
North Derbyshire
Hive Type
National
Number of Hives
4 hives, 1 nuc
Just checked main hive (double brood national) and found two sealed queen cells. These are on two different frames in upper brood box. Both are centrally positioned and on their own. Must have missed them - thought they were drone cells when check ing 6 days ago.

Queen is still present and laying well (eight frames with new eggs). She had slowed down but I attributed it to weather.

Earlier (2/5/11) in the year I had one queen cell which I moved to nuc before sealing and they did not make any more until now.

Should I :

1. leave alone and hope they are superceding.
1a remove 1 QC and then leave alone to supercede.

2. Remove one/both QC's to nuc and demaree main hive.

3. destroy QCs and see what they do next

4 any other suggestions

Thanks for prompt replies and advice
 
Last edited:
These sound like supercedure cells. Personally I would leave them.
 
These sound like supercedure cells. Personally I would leave them.
:iagree: The presence of sealed queen cells AND freshly laid eggs means that the queen has not slimmed down to fly off with a swarm so supercedure it is.

As belt and braces I would move 1 queen cell to a nuc and leave the main hive to supercede.
 
I hate to be consensual... but I too agree.

Nuc one for safety and let the rest get on with it.

PH
 
When deciding between supersedure or swarming it is helpful to consider the state of comb in your hive. With both supersedure and swarming, it is a pre-condition for the queen to lay an egg in a queen cell cup. Point being ... if it is new comb with not a lot of queen cell cups on it, it could be swarming impulse.

With either supersedure or swarming impulse, a swarm can leave.
 
Having set up demarree and seen how big the tower was, I have followed above advice and nuc'ed one QC and let the left the rest to get on with it. I've set up a bait hive as well just in case!

Time will tell if this is the right course of action, but I felt if I AS'd and they really do want to supersede then this will be an ongoing issue so I'd rather risk a swarm now when hopefully I can do something about it.

Thanks for the advice its really helpful and I often find just trying to write out the question helps me focus on whats what and get all my information together.
 
Back
Top