Anyone have any experience in keeping a queenless starter-finisher colony for raising you own queens?
I have this hive that is so super aggressive, that I decided to requeen it. These bees were so bad, they'd follow you as far as 50 yards, and still be trying to sting you hours after opening the hive up....even the next day a few would still be flying around trying to get me.......
While in the process of requeening this hive, I decided to try and make a starter-finisher queenless colony. I had read this technique in my Dadant-"Contemporary Queen Rearing" and wanted to try it. I killed the aggressive queen, swept down the bees, and took every frame of brood, honey, pollen etc....and distributed it between 5 other hives. I then set up the box as spelled out in my Dadant book, adding two division board feeders, 3 frames pollen, and two frames of open brood. This hive is a "free-flying" starter-finisher colony and not confined in any way. I checked them today and already have roughly 4-6 queens drawn out. I plan on making some splits next week, then swap out the frames with more open brood and continue to let them draw out more and more queen cells. I've decided to use their aggression to my advantage, and make them help me increase my numbers........
Everything is going pretty good right now.
Anybody had any similiar experience with this? I am trying to decide how often to add more capped brood for increasing/replacing the worker/nurse bees, and keeping the number of bees high. It appears the aggressiveness of this hive is paying off, and they make great queens with all that aggression. Hopefully, the queens will be not as aggressive, as I used some better bee gene line for larva/open brood. I'm checking and keeping the division board feeders full, and will probably add more pollen cells every other week. Anyone had luck with anything like this?
Comments appreciated!