Neils
Down to Earth with a bump.
by
, 17-04-2011 at 05:55 PM (2630 Views)
I think my mentee got a crash course today of a wide selection of what can go wrong in beekeeping.
I got the first look at the colony down on the nature reserve and as soon as we opened it up I had a sinking feeling. The box was absolutely packed to the rafters with bees and, sure enough, sealed queen cells. I'd guess they must have gone almost a week ago judging by the lack of eggs and almost total lack of larvae in Brood laid across 9 14x12 frames in total. Everywhere there wasn't brood was crammed with nectar but I had at least taken a super down with me just to make sure they had some space
Up at the allotment I checked the hive that was supposedly being bailey changed. There's a queen, she was laying when I last checked but they'd done nothing with the 14x12 box on top at all. Never mind, let's take that off and let the mentee get her hands dirty in this hive. At the third frame we hit brood. All of it drone. And the fourth and the fifth etc etc etc. We saw the queen but that seemed neither here nor there really.
Feeling somewhat despondent I asked her to close that one up and we moved on to the other 14x12 that already had supersedure cells in it last week that I figured must be about ready to hatch. I removed one and checked it... Dead. I carefully removed another and peeled back the wax of the cell. Movement! That left 4 other cells in the colony. At this point the queen wasn't the only thing "hatching".
What if we took this virgin queen and replaced the drone layer with her? If we remove this queen, drone layer or not and replace her with a Virgin queen into a colony containing only drone brood is there a risk that the workers might turn drone laying? What if we put the virgin queen into the colony AND add a frame of Brood in all stages from one of the neighbour's colonies (after asking him naturally)? In the end we opted for the latter option. A frame of 14x12 brood placed into the upper box and the virgin placed onto the top bars of the national.
I did consider whether to just shook swarm them onto the 14x12 but opted in the end to keep them on the two brood boxes and take it from there. The old queen is sat in a matchbox in front of the keyboard where she seems to have quite happily just laid an egg. I think she may be destined to go to one of the guys on the BBKA forum.
I'm concerned about the continuing problems I'm having with queens on the allotment. I've never had a queen last more than a year so to see this one go drone laying and the other supersede in less than a year doesn't fill me with confidence especially when I'm ringed by other beekeepers so there's no apparent excuse for poor mating performance. I can accept some of the problems may be related to my own inexperience and mistakes but I'm hard pushed to see how any of that can make a queen go drone laying.