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Thread: I was revisiting the BBKA Course in a Case....

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    Default I was revisiting the BBKA Course in a Case....

    For the beginner's course and was perusing the presentation for Swarming when I noticed this:




    I was going to include the notes for the slide, but they don't correspond with the actions being outlined on the slide itself so it seems a bit pointless. That error aside, do we agree that is good advice to be giving to new beekeepers?

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    Administrator gavin's Avatar
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    Errr ..... that's pretty poor. Almost a guarantee of losing a swarm, and even if the underlying message was correct the PPT is far from clear.

    We just dip into Course in a Case for material to help our locally designed beginners' course. I hadn't noticed this 'two queen cell' slide. Used to do that myself, but I've learned my lesson. It only makes sense if you later go in and knock off the poorer of the two. Or perhaps if you follow it up by moving the box with the queen cells to the other side of the old site after a week to bleed off more flying bees and make the remaining bees decide to stay put - but who has space each side of their hives for that?

    In my view artificial swarms are best demonstrated using boxes on a table. Apideas are nice and light to carry, full brood boxes are better.
    Last edited by gavin; 08-12-2011 at 10:13 AM.

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    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    That advice to leave two cells is just plain daft.
    Leave one cell and if for some reason it fails to hatch or the queen gets lost, you then recombine the two parts or introduce another queen or queen cell to the queenless part.

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    Does start to make me wonder whether the source of that advice making such a comeback this year is the BBKA itself. I know it made it into the BBKA news during the summer as well as most of the forums over the course of the year.

    I think it also gives a bit more credence to the view that a lot of advice once it appears in "print" somewhere just gets repeated parrot fashion by the next author(s) putting something together on these basis that If it was said there, it must be true. Hence it's not so much that the bees "don't read the books" rather that a lot of books simply contain a lot of bad advice when it comes to bees.

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    I think the whole Pagden system is flawed in any case regardless of whether you keep 1 queen cell or 2. I teach a beginners course and include the pagden system just so that the students know what to write in an exam. I then explain methods that actually prevent swarming

    Rosie

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    I don't know, if you've got the space to do it then I think it's pretty simple and works well enough. Once you've got two or more hives on the go then it starts to get unwieldy.

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    I find it works better if you've got plenty of drawn comb to put with the queen but even then it fails too often for my liking. The worst part about it is that the books make it sound foolproof and even advise that once done there is no further need to inspect for queen cells. Beginners that attempt it lose swarms and it can affect their confidence.

    Rosie

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    I just looked again at the slide and noticed that it does say "Stage 1 - Day 1". Perhaps a later stage describes removing a queen cell after they have been sealed and before the first virgin emerges.

    Rosie

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    It doesn't. In fact the later slide specifically says first Q to emerge will kill the other(s).

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    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    It doesn't. In fact the later slide specifically says first Q to emerge will kill the other(s).
    That can happen if the two cells hatch simultaneously, but if there are a reasonable amount of bees in the colony the first one to hatch invariably leaves with a swarm. This happens even in a nuc left with two cells.
    I wonder who was involved in that advice. It wasn't Roger Patterson as he always sensibly says that leaving two cells is daft.

    That the first queen out kills the other or tears down the cell is one of the more prevalent myths in beekeeping. I have had several fairly inexperienced beekeepers argue this point with me due to reading it somewhere or other. Needless to say they lose swarms left right and centre.

    If you have more than a couple of colonies, keeping a spare nuc or two is a good idea as you can remove all the queen cells and combine with the nuc to make a queenright colony.

    Personally, I do not like the idea of letting a large colony requeen itself especially if it is in a suburban garden.
    If the queen gets lost on a mating flight you can be left with something very difficult to deal with, and the other risk is a drastic change in temper with the new queen depending on what she mates with. These problems crop up all the time in my BKA.

    If you do that business of moving the colony with the queen cells to either side of the queenright colony every couple of days to constantly bleed off all the flyers you might get away with leaving two cells but it is a lot of faffing around.

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