Originally Posted by
Jon
80% acetic acid fumigation on comb = a clean start. AFB is about the only thing it wont kill.
An apidea full of bees is much less than your average cast and the bees struggle to draw comb if the weather is wet or cool.
Also an apidea is filled with bees shaken from a colony is more akin to a bunch of bees who have just found themselves queenless as opposed to the bees in a cast.
Giving an apidea at least one comb very much helps it.
And lest we forget, you can get a second or a third queen from a single apidea in a season and these ones are starting with comb drawn by the initial group of bees. You remove the mated queen and add a queen cell or a virgin to an apidea with bees comb and brood.
Also an apidea is filled with bees shaken from a colony is more akin to a bunch of bees who have just found themselves queenless as opposed to the bees in a cast.
The Mobus/Bibba book 'mating in miniature (1983) is very dated and suffers from the common fault of making everything seem ten times more complicated than it has to be.
The equipment he is using which predates Apideas is archaic and massively over-engineered.
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