Re-queened worker laying hive

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Jif5

New Bee
Joined
Jul 16, 2012
Messages
10
Reaction score
0
Location
West of London
Hive Type
National
Number of Hives
3
Hello,

I am very pleased that I have managed to successfully requeen a layer working hive. As a relative newcomer I read up as much as possible on the forum on solutions, but expected very little success as the colony seemed on a hopeless downward spiral.

If anyone is interested my technique was as follows:

At night move the layer working colony about 30 feet away from the original position.

I then positioned a stand, floor, new brood box, lid etc with two frames of drawn comb containing some honey and undrawn out foundation in the position of the old hive. I then left this for two days to allow any foraging workers to fly from the laying worker hive and return to the new hive.

On the night of day two I opened the laying worker hive and shook out and brushed off all the frames off bees into a patch of long grass (this was only 5 ft or so feet away from the laying worker hive and it was a warm night) I then closed the hive up again and left it in its new position of another day.
On night three I repeated the shake out process again on the drones and workers who had found there way back to this hive. After the second shake out I removed the old hive completely and put any drawn out frames that did not contain worker brood into the new hive ( in the original position)
The following day I introduced a purchased laying queen in a cage into the new hive and left her for 4 days with the candy plug covered. On day 5 I opened the candy plug and let the bees release her. Three days later I carefully checked to see if she had been released. As a very small pice of candy remained I removed this and helped her out. She wandered off down into the frames.

Today I have just checked and she is happily wanting around and been accepted by the hive. eggs present and I shall now leave her for 10 days and see how the larvae develop.

I am surprised this worked, but would be interested to know if any of the forum members think that shaking out at night ( twice) will have helped my chances?

Thanks
 
Well done and thanks for sharing I have a couple of hives like this myself and gradually bleeding the bees of into a strong hive.
 
I have a couple of hives in the same situation. Was thinking of something very similar or maybe just pop them on the grass after a thorough feed by opening up some honey cells then smoking to make em gorge a bit. Then hopefully ending up in the 3 facing colonies.
Thanks for sharing.
 
thanks for this....I had a swarm cast that reduced to half a frame in colony size over the last month. They only had a tiny piece of raised comb and had a laying worker and drone cells building. I finally accepted defeat with them tonight and shook them all out and removed their hive. I am hoping that some of them are accepted into my hives that were sitting right next to the swarm hive. Felt so guilty shaking them out and leaving them so abandoned but your process gives me a little hope. Some of the swarm were going into the other hives uncontested so hopefully some will survive. I realise that saving only a few bees is insignificant to some keepers but I need to know I did all I could for them (couldn't consider uniting as my other colonies are too new and the size of the swarm was too small to disturb another hive by uniting)
 
I requened a TBH with laying workers by uniting with a Nuc.. Worked perfectly.
 

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