Double Brood

[POPZ]

Ensure that she's below, or put her there, put the queen excluder on, and wait!

G.

Hey gavin - sounds far too simple - just let the brood hatch in the super? If there is any.

[gavin]

Yup. 21 days afterwards the last brood will be emerging, just about when your heather will be starting its season. Some would prefer not to harvest honey from bred-in comb, but if it is just for your own consumption I don't see a problem.

G.

[Stromnessbees]

...show that the Austrians as well as the Ulsterfolk can beat Scots hands-down in penny-pinching!

You'll need to treat us to some pictures of those fishing-line combs.

Will try to post some pictures.


Re. thriftyness - Who can beat this one:

I get 3 different uses out of every teabag.

No. 1: a cup of tea
No. 2: I squeeze the teabag with a facecloth to give my face a gentle rub with the wonderful antioxidants from the tea-concentrate, very refreshing and it also helps the complexion.
No. 3: after drying the teabag on a rack it gets burned in my smoker (smells nicer than most other smoker fuel)

Doris

[gavin]

I like dried rotten wood but I can imagine that it is in short supply on Orkney. The dry version is also pretty hard to find around here at the moment.

You mean that you only get *one* cup of tea from a tea-bag?!

G.

[Trog]

Love the teabag idea. I think I'll pass on stage 2 as I'm quite weatherbeaten enough and all my teabags do two cups of tea before I'm finished with them. However, using teabags in the smoker sounds like a great idea ... just so long as the girls don't request cake with it! Getting the teabags dry might be a challenge. It has just rained every day for 2 weeks. Not all day, every day, but precious little dry time in between showers! Another mated, laying queen while I was away. Hurrah!

[Stromnessbees]

Hi Trog

One way to dry the teabags os by placing them on an empty egg-carton. The wick(ed) effect of the carton works very quickly, and once the teabags and the egg-carton are dry they make the perfect combined smoker-fuel.

I set this combination alight with one of the barbecue-lighters from the Coop (£2.99), another bargain.


Back to the topic (double brood):

The system of double-brood-divided-by-queen-excluder came handy again today, when I needed bees for a newly mated queen. As I had put a few frames of brood above the QE of a strong colony last week I was able to create an instant nuc today by removing the bottom box (with the queen) to another site. The upper box remained on the old site and was united with the newly mated queen and her little entourage through a sheet of newspaper. I'll check the result at the weekend.

Doris

[Trog]

Hi Doris - I'll give it a try! Plenty of egg cartons as folk always kindly give them to us! We light our smoker with the Oban Times and one of those clicker-lighters with a long nozzle you get from Lakeland! Currently have lots of the shredded cardboard packing from Thornes (wish they'd not shred the plastic tape with it, though, that doesn't half stink) to use up, along with lots of lovely rotten wood! Sunny intervals promised for tomorrow so maybe I'll get to see the bees - high time they were inspected!

[Jon]

The upper box remained on the old site and was united with the newly mated queen and her little entourage through a sheet of newspaper.
Doris

Hi Doris
It's always a bit riskier uniting or introducing a queen when you have the flying bees present.
When I want to make up a nuc with a queen from an Apidea I lift out two frames of sealed brood plus adhering bees and shake in another frame of bees.
I put the queen in a roller cage between the two frames.
24 hours later when the flying bees have returned to their hive of origin, I lift out one of the frames and set it flat with the cage on its side. When I release the queen from the cage, the young bees accept her immediately. I have done this 8 times so far this year and it has worked every time.
You then have a nuc with no foragers and a lot of brood just about to hatch so you have to make sure it has a frame of stores and a frame of pollen to get it through the first week or so.
It should have 4 frames of young bees within a week when the brood has hatched.
If you take the two frames from a double brood system it is even better as the bees in the upper box will think they are queenless and are very keen to accept an introduced queen.

[Adam]

Jon,
I've not released a queen by hand but always left them in the hive in a cage; either a plastic cage with a hard candy plug or in a butler cage with a single sheet of newspaper held over the end with an elastic band. Sometimes there have been workers in the cages, sometimes not. So far they have always been accepted. On one occassion the colony swarmed with the new queen 6 days later but she was recovered. Its always good to go back a few days later and see the queen on the comb with eggs and small larvae there.

[Stromnessbees]

You'll need to treat us to some pictures of those fishing-line combs.

Finally I took some pictures:

The fishing line is 50lb monofilament, very strong.

DSCF4669..jpgI find this one the quickest to prepare.
It only needs three holes drilled into each side and a thin strip of wax folded over the top line.

DSCF4672..jpg DSCF4673..jpgThis takes more preparation: 4 pins into the bottom bars and eight holes drilled into the top, the starter strip gets pinched in like regular foundation.
You can't strectch the line as much as in the other design as it would bend the top and bottom bars.

DSCF4683..jpgThis one is for beekeepers with too much time at their hand, I only made one to try it out.

DSCF4687..jpgThat's what the finished result should be. Sometimes the bees build dronecomb instead, but it doesn't bother me too much. I find it important to insert the starter strips between tow straight combs to encourage good results. They can be inserted right into the middle of the broodnest as they don't seem to create a barrier for the queen like a sheet of foundation might do.

Doris