Mine was queenright from the start. I have never had much luck with queenright queenrearing before but this year I have managed to get 2 different queenright systems working quite well.
Mine was queenright from the start. I have never had much luck with queenright queenrearing before but this year I have managed to get 2 different queenright systems working quite well.
Hi Steve. Everything has to be right for queenright queenraising to work. Ie, good weather, good nutrition, pollen frames available, good grafting with suitable larvae.
In my relatively limited experience, the weather is critical and the colony has to be really strong. My colonies are not minded to start queen cells after 3 weeks of rain no matter what way you rearrange the brood above the excluder. You might get 2 or 3 out of 20 started under these conditions.
In fact the old queen had flown back home, leaving bees in the nuc a few feet away, and taken up residence again in her old double-storey Smith hive. The very one I've just seen - along with my gloved hand - on STV News to illustrate another piece on AFB! The film they took a couple of weeks ago must be in their library now.
She wasn't clipped of course . So I rearranged the colony in the Ben Harden/Wilkinson and Brown manner. The grafts - and that odd queen cell which may have come from a larva a worker moved into a cup - look good so I'm expecting them to be fine now.
The Mark Winston book on the Biology of the Honeybee quotes three papers (Butler and two of his own) that mention workers moving eggs.
More musical chairs.
I wonder is it the queen who decides to move back? My guess would be that the workers pushed her out of the nuc and went back to the old colony with her.
How far away was the nuc from the smith hive and what was left in it after the queen returned. Did the queen mate from the smith hive in its current position meaning she had a memory of its location?
The queen came from near Airlie a good 25 km away as the bee flies, and a significantly longer drive, in the double brood Smith in which she was living until I asked her nicely to step aside for the good of the whole apiary. Maybe three frames of bees into the nuc most of which stayed for the first few days at least and about one and a half there now. As far as I can tell she is last year's or before. I marked her a couple of weeks ago. The nuc was just a few feet away, so yes, maybe the workers pushed her out and guided her back. I wouldn't put it past them.
Bookmarks