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Thread: apidea management and grafting photos

  1. #31
    Administrator gavin's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jon View Post
    These are the best cells I have seen all year, large and very pitted.
    Do I get any points for this one?!

    G.


  2. #32
    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    That is the queen cell equivalent of having hair extensions.

  3. #33
    Administrator gavin's Avatar
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    Whacky! These bees have not been near the cannabis-supplemented rape field. There is another I didn't photograph with a big circle of comb over the Q cell. They'll need trimmed to fit into an Apidea later.

  4. #34
    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    They do that sometimes and can even draw out the entire frame below the cells which remain entombed. They are still viable and just need a bit of trimming. You might get something looking like Cheryl Cole coming out of that cell in the first picture.
    Last edited by Jon; 14-07-2011 at 12:14 PM.

  5. #35
    Senior Member Adam's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jon View Post
    Hi Adam
    There are still those who don't accept that queens leave with a bodyguard of bees on a mating flight but I have seen this a dozen times now. The curious thing is that every bee from the apidea accompanies the queen. I wonder if under normal circumstances there is a fixed number of queen escorts, 500+, which is greater than the total number of bees in an apidea leading to its total abandonment as the bees accompany her. I wonder does the same thing happen in full colonies. .
    Jon, a thought worked its way through the porrige that's my brain yesterday. The avatar I use on the BBKA site with bees clustering around a hive may well have been bees coming back from a mating flight. (The armchair elsewhere is a different thing altogether!) It was 2 or 3 years ago; the hive had a virgin queen inside and a swarm issued - and came back. The queen was laying shortly after - a couple of days- from memory. I put down the swarm to something else at the time, although I wasn't convinced. I would have a strong suspicion that they followed her out on a mating flight. Why would a colony fly out and come back again?
    Last edited by Adam; 22-07-2011 at 09:14 AM.

  6. #36
    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    I posted on the other mating swarm thread that a cluster which settled just outside my apiary which I tipped into an apidea two days ago had eggs in it today.

    I also found eggs in another apidea.

    The timeline of this one is as follows.

    I had a large colony swarm in my garden on Friday 1st July. The queen was clipped and luckily I found her back inside. I did an artificial swarm and grafted into the queenless part that same evening. A dozen cells were started. The cells hatched on 12th and 13th July in Apideas and I found eggs in the first of them today, 26th July.

    new-laid-upright-eggs.jpg

  7. #37
    Senior Member Adam's Avatar
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    I was reading through a Brother Adam book yesterday and he wrote of the average failure rate for queens to return from mating. I.e. for every 100 queens that flew, how many didn't come back.

    What do you think the percentage is?

  8. #38
    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    Some get lost on orientation flights before they even take mating flights as I often find queens have disappeared before they could have flown and mated, around 4-5 days from emerging.
    I would say this year about 25% are getting lost but last year it was worse.
    You lose a few at every stage- grafts not started, cells which don't hatch, cells which hatch but queen has deformed wings, orientation flights, mating flight, introduction to a colony.
    Plus some get destroyed by wasps, or a careless beekeeper can let them starve and abscond.
    I found one which had been overrun by wasps and there were only two bees in it. Fortunately one of them was the queen and I put her in a roller cage with a single attendant and placed this in an apidea from which I had removed the queen last week.
    I released her after 48 hours and I noticed she was laying today. She had looked like a mated queen even though there were no eggs in the apidea which was overrun.

  9. #39
    Senior Member Adam's Avatar
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    Brother Adams percentage was 18% failure. Bees that thend to drift (and hence rob) such as Italians were worse than others, so I guess their navigation is just not as good.

  10. #40
    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    I would be happy with 18% losses but even bumbling around we have 72 queens mated and none of them look jaundiced either.

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