Originally Posted by
Calluna4u
A tale of disaster related to the above from Phillip. Disasters plague us all from time to time, so while this was a real waste of time and effort in the queen unit it just goes to show that nothing is foolproof and any beek that has never had a disaster is probably full of the fertiliser emanating from the male members of our bovine friends......
Think back only a short while...though it now seems so distant....to the heatwave of 3 days we had. We made a late start to the queen rearing this year due to the cold dry east winds not being the best for producing quality QC's. The first wave of mating boxes had been placed on their stands a few days earlier. The hot days were mayhem even in the cooler conditions in the forest where the mating boxes are and a significant swarm appeared about 20 feet up in a pine tree. From 15 to 20 of the mating boxes were either empty or severely bee depleted.
The swarm was seriously unsettled, moved location several times over the next three days, divided into multiple clusters and went back together again. After this they ended up on a fence post and were a bit quieter, without the masses of dancing bees waggling away on the face of the cluster. One of my guys on his own initiative hived it in a Langstroth nuc box, and to my surprise it stayed put. The carnage among the virgins must have been complete. Now it is in great order with a fine queen laying strongly. Its is almost entirely (we think) the product of the absconded mating boxes, so the sad part is all the lost virgins grafted and raised by Jolanta who found the whole episode disheartening. At least she did not have the full compliment set out already. One UK rearer, of long experience, who got going early told me he had zero success from his first 200 and what had not absconded had to be shaken out. Big loss.
I tell Jolanta its just a freak weather pattern to blame and just to take it as one of these things and carry on. Its not an easy country to be a queen rearer on any scale.
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