Beemaster's International Beekeeping Forum
BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER => GENERAL BEEKEEPING - MAIN POSTING FORUM. => Topic started by: jaseemtp on April 19, 2013, 10:56:56 pm
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Alrighty
I made 35 hives queen less on the first of April. On the third the cells arrived and it was cool here (47f) was our high. I held the cells inside the house where it was 70f until the next day where it was still cool (47F). I planted the cells and left them alone for one week and took a peek, I found most all of the cells had been removed down to the plastic cup but could not see any queens.
Today I looked again two weeks after planting them to find only 2 queens, I was not able to find any eggs or open larva at this time. At the same time I have had 4 swarms spring up in my yard, I was able to capture these and found the queens in all of them. They are small queens but all look exactly the same.
Am I to impatient? Did I do something wrong?
Thanks for any help and or feed back
Jason
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Why would you make 35 hives queenless?
If you were just planning on requeening, logic would dictate that you keep the old queens in case you need them. It would be hard to save all 35, but you could have probably saved a dozen or more by taking a few deeps, screwing on a solid bottom, put dividers in to split each deep into four 2 frame queen boxes. Drill an entrance for each and you would be all set.
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because they were from two year old colonies and needed to be requeened
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You are not very new beekeeper if you have 35 hives.
Now you have hives full of queen cells.
And one month brooding gap ahead.
Propably you get laying queens this time of year.
Emerging queen to laying is a 10 days gap. It is lots of brood.
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because they were from two year old colonies and needed to be requeened
:lau: :lau: :lau: :lau:
Hint: Bees do not read books
You need to judge Queens by performance not age.
Is the honey flow over the area where you live ???
If the honey flow is not over you just lost your honey crop for the year.
BEE HAPPY Jim 134 :)
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Finski, I still consider myself new but this is my 4th year keeping bees on my own. My dad and grand dad kept them for 40+ years. Currently I have 70 colonies and I am wanting to bring in some new blood to my gene pool here. queen cells seemed to be the most cost effective way of doing this. My thoughts were to requeen 1/2 of my hives with the cells.
Jim everything here is late this year, so our flow has not even started. again I requeened the hives because they were two years old and I wanted new blood.
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Wow. You have quite much hives.
Not bad idea to change them new queen are not earger to swarm.
Perhaps you do not loose much or anything if you now get new laying queen into hives.
When hives have capped queen cells, they accept easily new queens.
But I have seen tens of time how bees seem to accept newly emerged queen and then after 2 days a virgin is gone.
But like Australians have revieled, you change the queens and bees will change 30% of them during next month.
I change my queens every year. I like to rear them.
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virgin queens are hard to spot sometimes. i probably wouldn't have squashed half of my queens before the honey flow. when we re-queened every year we did it in august after the main flows were over. worst case if you don't see any eggs in most of those hives in another week or so you can add frames of eggs from some of your hives with more prolific layers. i wouldn't give up on them just yet, though.
as far as re-queening yearly goes, i'd keep any queens that really performed for a second season (probably planning on using them more for breeding than production the second year) and probably replace the average and below average performers right after the main flow. just my 2 cents, when you get up to 100 hives or more you can't sit back and try to max out every egg form every queen like you can with 20 hives unless you don't have a day job.
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Maybe changing 1/2 of my hives was a bit ambitious. I was reassured several times on how easily this would or should have worked. I plan grafting my own queens from now on.
I do sort if have a day job, I work 24 hour shifts so I'm at work for one day and off for two days.
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I've never bought cells. I don't know how well they take getting chilled, but that seems like a bad idea. Anything below 93F is going to be colder than the brood nest...
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I've never bought cells. I don't know how well they take getting chilled, but that seems like a bad idea. Anything below 93F is going to be colder than the brood nest...
IMHO :goodpost:
BEE HAPPY Jim 134 :)