Are you sure it's queenless? Did the bees raise queen cells from the frames of eggs? Maybe she'd just stopped laying for the winter. As Winnie-the-Pooh so wisely put it, 'you never can tell with bees'. :0
Are you sure it's queenless? Did the bees raise queen cells from the frames of eggs? Maybe she'd just stopped laying for the winter. As Winnie-the-Pooh so wisely put it, 'you never can tell with bees'. :0
re the longevity of bees, it's someting to do with the hypopharyngeal glands.Originally Posted by GRIZZLY
In Dadant-The Hive and the Honey Bee, Chapter 3 written by C.G. Butler, P72 in my edition, he cites work by Maurizio (1950) which states that:
This is a direct consequence of lack of brood rearing leading to an increase in protein reserves in the hypopharyngeal gland.queenlessness, or even a short interruption of egg laying at swarming time, causes the production of long lived bees similar to winter bees
Interesting, Jon. Warré recommended the “pioneer method” for increasing honey harvests in a Warré hive. This consisted of killing off the brood just before the flow. Guillaume and Frèrès have integrated this for varroa control. They give the following arguments:
Brood consumes 4 to 5 kilos of honey for every kilo stocked in the cells. When the brood is sacrificed, the drones are killed off. The comb having been destroyed with the brood, the queen stops laying for lack of space. The nurse bees which constantly produce royal jelly thus have a surplus of food which is consumed by all the bees. The colony benefits from this surplus of very rich food to very quickly build more comb. These bees also live longer, more than the 42-45 days normally the case.
That hardly fits with the 'natural beekeeping' peg that today's Warré enthusiasts like to hang their practices on!
Isn't it natural to want lots of honey?
Yup! It is probably also natural to want to take brood home for tea (yuck!), and also to develop easier systems for managing your local bees (such as having side bars as well as just top bars in your artificial bee boxes), and even natural to want to develop better means of controlling the pests and diseases that afflict your stock .....
G.
Are you sure it's queenless? Did the bees raise queen cells from the frames of eggs
Hi Trog Caught the swarm first week in Aug. It had a queen but it did'nt lay any eggs
My own opinion is that it failed to mate.Left it till late Sep. and tried couple of frames from other hive to make a queen without success was going to join it with main hive before winter but was'nt 100% sure how to do it. So the bees in this hive have been surviving without additions since Aug-Sep. Checked them this morning and still plenty of bees in hive. Hope they survive till May.
Hi Gscot,
when you caught the swarm what would have been the equivaltent number of frames it was sitting on? If they had no stores at that point to feed brood and were still building the queen wouldnt be laying much.
How many kilos was the swarm? - If it was a good sized one the queen could well have been the old queen - she would have reserves of eggs left or they would have superceeded her.
Re. queenlessness:
I sold a nuc to someone from my BKA in July with a newly mated and marked 2010 queen.
She transferred it to a full size box and carried out weekly inspections, noting the queen present on every one until 30th August.
On subsequent inspections no queen was seen and towards the end of September there was no brood at all.
I checked the colony at the start of October and was pretty sure it was queenless.
At this stage she was beating herself up as she though she had accidently killed the queen.
I asked about supersedure cells but she said she had not seen any.
I had a spare queen in an apidea and offered to requeen it for her.
There were about 4 frames of bees at this stage.
I brought round my apidea with the queen on 15th October and checked through the colony again and there was still no sign of a queen and there was no brood of any sort.
I was about to close up and put the apidea above the crown board hole over a piece of newspaper when I noticed a little golf ball sized clump of bees.
I teased it apart and a black virgin queen scuttled out.
She then told me that she had seen this little clump of bees several times during her inspections looking for a queen.
She checked the colony at the start of November and found eggs larvae and sealed brood which means that this queen mated extremely late in the year and started to lay in the last fortnight in October.
I e-mailed her a few days ago and she says the colony is still alive.
If it gets through the winter that might be a nice colony to graft from as the mother queen which was superseded was from a 100% amm colony and I doubt if there is anything other than amm drones on the wing during October.
I have noticed a couple of my colonies ball the queen like this to protect her when the hive is opened.
Last edited by Jon; 29-01-2011 at 09:07 PM.
Caught the swarm from my original hive It was covering about 5 frames, put in 2 drawn frames and fed heavy for 2 weeks,no sign of eggs or brood but had drawn another 3 frames, checked again in 2 weeks no sign of eggs or brood checked 2 weeks later no eggs or brood removed queen and added 2 frames of eggs and brood no sign of queen cells. By this time is was too late to do anything else (i think)
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