RoseCottage
Field Bee
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2009
- Messages
- 718
- Reaction score
- 0
- Location
- Near Andover, UK
- Hive Type
- WBC
- Number of Hives
- From 5 to 2 and hopefully a better year
Hive 1 is in the middle of changing from standard bb to 14 12 bb and is a second year colony.
Hive 2 colony arrived last Friday and so are just settling in.
My question is around hive 1. Last Saturday there were no queen cells to be seen. yesterday about three frames had qc's and one of those about 5. Some were high on the frame, some in the middle, some on the side, and some off the bottom. There is still undrawn brood frame - we have been swapping brood frame out and adding deep frames at the edges.
Some cells were capped, some uncapped, some partial, some had white gunk (royal jelly?) .
All were scratched out and I saw the queen, a 2009 green marked girl.
We have the old bb above the new with a qe between so the brood can still hatch on the old framed but the queen cannot continue to lay. We have two supers above (both have been spun this week).
I thought that moving to deep bb over a number of weeks would stop them producing qc's as they/she would not feel congested. Do I now need to act or just keep scratching them out and continuing my deep bb change process? Are my girls about to leave me?
Any thoughts are very welcome.
We have also noticed that as the old bb is hatching out larvae they are heavily filling the remains with stores. should we take this too as it will just go rock hard (osr is all around).
Finally when we got to the hive yesterday there were girls all over the landing board, 6-700, even hanging off it in clumps...the weather (25) or were they leaving? They stayed put for the hour we were there.
all the best,
Sam
