Beekeeping myths

[Jon]

There is a lot of stuff engrained in beekeeping which is not actually true or at best is only true under certain circumstances.
I see this stuff repeated all the time on the bee forums and hear it regularly at BKA meetings.
In my own experience all of the stuff below is false.

-A colony bringing in pollen is always queenright

-Bees will not store fondant in spring, so feeding fondant can do no harm as they will only take it if they need it.

-When a virgin queen mates she stores the sperm from each drone in a discrete 'package' in her spermatheca which means that the colour or the temper of the bees in the colony can change as she creates workers from the sperm of a different drone.

-A virgin queen has to fly to a drone congregation area to mate.

-Black bees/AMM are bad tempered

-When a supersedure takes place the old queen will be disposed of only after the new queen has started to lay

-feral bees will not make a nest with more than 8 parallel combs.

-aggressive bees produce more honey

-the bees know best!

Something there is bound to start an argument!

[GRIZZLY]

You forgot about bees not reading the right books !!!

[Neils]

The bees don't read the books
There is just a lot of crap in the books. (oops sorry Grizz)

A Colony of Drone Laying workers can't be re-queened, tip them on the floor 50 feet away etc etc.

[Jon]

Nice one Nellie. I forgot about that one and it is one of the most common - the tip them out advice. That is repeated all the time and is often accompanied with the sage proclamation that laying workers, or even the laying worker singular cannot fly back.
The technical term used by Roger Patterson for dubious book content is twaddle.
It is hard to queen a laying worker colony but not impossible. It's rarely worth the bother unless you have time on your hands.

Grizzly. Every time I see the 'bees don't read the books' quote I am tempted to post equally useful advice!
Bees don't play snooker. Bees don't ride unicycles. Bees don't eat moths.

[Neils]

I'm reliably informed, though haven't tested it myself, that a Virgin Queen is the secret to solving laying workers.

[Jon]

The kill them sometimes though.
Michael Bush's advice of putting in a frame of open brood once a week for 3 weeks before introducing a queen cell or a virgin is probably the best plan but it is generally a waste of time.
If you have loads of spare virgin queens you could just keep running them in I suppose and one of them might get lucky.

[Neils]

The brood should stop more workers from coming into lay so I can see the logic behind introducing brood frames over a period of time.

The reasoning behind introducing a virgin queen is that until she starts laying she has no identity [as a queen] at the point she's introduced so isn't rejected in the same way as putting a mated queen in would be.

[Jon]

Some colonies are just not worth it.
I had one which went queenless so I gave it a queen cell on the point of hatching.
A virgin emerged and they let it run around for a few days and then it disappeared.
I gave it a laying queen from an apidea and they let it lay about 5 eggs then it disappeared and they made a queen cell from one of the eggs which hatched and then the virgin again disappeared a few days later. By this point it was mid October and I combined it with a small queenright colony beside it and this was the only colony I lost over the winter.

This is what I should have done with it rather than attempting to requeen.

[Adam]

Michael Bush's advice of putting in a frame of open brood once a week for 3 weeks before introducing a queen cell or a virgin is probably the best plan but it is generally a waste of time.

By the time you've put in 3 frames of brood over 3 weeks, you might just as well have made a nuc with 3 frames of brood and a queen; after 3 weeks you would have 4 frames of brood as they would have laid up a frame themselves anyway and by then you've got a viable colony, so as you say Jon, a waste of time. Shake out the laying worker colony so the bees stengthen another hive and then make a new colony.

[Neils]

It takes n pounds of honey/syrup to make x pounds of wax.

While I have no issue with the statement that 'you don't get something for nothing' I've not seen anything but pub legend/forum assertion around what resources are required to make wax.

In the grand scheme of things it's irrelevant. After a shook swarm or hiving a swarm into foundation, sure, give the bees a feed. Little and often is my, hobbyist, view. I see lots of people giving bees gallons of syrup, needed or not on the above basis when it's not really necessary.