Hoping for Good Results

After the hives were re-queened Thursday, I had some out of town things to take care of until Sunday. I needed to pick up some things around the bee yard that I left lying around. If the new queens are accepted I may have to change names for the hives. I have been toying with herb names for a while. I am big fan of herbs and I grow them all the time.My new NUC sitting on top of the TBH is a split from “Old Faithfull”, my original hive. I’m not sure if it has a queen, but it has a frame to make one and plenty of resources. I also did something in the NUC and all the hives that I think I'm pretty smart for having had thought of it. I put them all to work drawing out 4 total bars from the TBH hive. The bees for it are due to arrive early May. The drawn out frames would be a great head start for the package. So the NUC is composed of one frame of eggs (only one I found in “Old Faithful “) to make a queen if there is no queen, and medium frame of honey, a frame of pollen and honey, one new never used plastic frame, and one Bar from the TBH. From the outside the NUC looks promising.

In my other 3 hives I placed the new queen cage face down over the top of frames containing capped brood. How did I manage to make the cage fit?? Simple, I took one or two frames from the supper above and replaced them with bars from the TBH. They have no bottom bar so the cage doesn’t get in the way, and the bees should begin to draw them out. As soon as I have time and the weather cooperates, I will open the hives to inspect for newly laid eggs from my new queens and at the same time retrieve the TBH bars to replace them with regular frames.

Here is “Old Faithfull”. I removed two deep frames and one medium frame to create the NUC above. The bees should be working on one TBH bar and

my eager NUC and new queen are working on two TBH bars. The colony also moved the brood frames completely up to the supper.

My Angry hive has a new queen and are working on two TBH bars. The colony has a great laying pattern but is also laying a lot of drones. They are useless resource sucking male bees.

I’m torn between inspecting to look at the new queens or letting them be until the weekend. I think I’ll let the weather decide. We are supposed to get more rain in the next few days.

How to Re-Queen a Beehive

If you are looking for the best advice on how to re-queen a beehive, I suggest you keep looking because you are not going to find it here.

Reasons to re queen a hive:

• Older queens are more prone to swarming
• Replacing a failing queen
• Better stock traits like pest and disease resistances
• And in my case, improving bad attitudes

So how do you get new queen bees? There are a few suppliers online; I chose to use Gabees.com mainly due to its proximity to my location

How are queen bees shipped to the beekeeper? Well see for yourselves below. I had to pay extra for the overnight delivery because I needed to run out of town for a few days. Here is the envelope that arrived last Thursday.
Below are the contents of the envelope. On the left 3 marked queens (mine) and on the right five marked and clipped wing queens(Mike's).
What is a marked and clipped queen? See the bright spot on the picture below. That’s the queen with a painted dot on her thorax. It makes it easier to spot her next time I’m looking for her in the hive. A Clipped queen is a queen that had one or two of its wings clipped off. It doesn’t prevent her and the hive from attempting to swarm away, it just prevents her from getting very far. Since the workers won’t leave her behind, the swarm is usually found in a cluster on the floor right outside the hive, making it easy to collect and re-hive somewhere new.

One of the few tips to re-queen is to not use a lot of smoke. Well, when the hive has an attitude smoke is your friend. Best advice I can give anyone, is to have a second set of eyes. I asked Mike from Mike’s farm to come over and be my second set of eyes. We had to completely dismantle 2 out of the 3 hives to find two of the queens. Below is a picture of Mike inspecting one of the frames. Notice the body below is lacking any frames at that point.

My strategy was to have spare hive bodies, and inspect frame by frame for the queen. The 1st queen we didn’t find until every frame was out. Mike eventually spotted her on the bottom of the hive stand. She was making a run for the underside. The second we completely dismantle and couldn’t find her on the stand once all the frames were out. To make sure she wasn’t there I took the hive body some 20 feet away, shook all the bees off, and returned to the location. I figured if she was in there hiding, all the bees should be able to fly back, but not her. Laying queens can’t fly; it takes them days to slim down into shape to fly. By then she surely would have died before being able to return to the hive. The draw back of shaking all the bees out is then you have tons of bees fling around highly upset at the world. As we were putting the hive back together, Mike caught sight of her on one of the frames. We missed her on the way out.The queen in the 3rd hive we couldn’t find. We also couldn’t find but one frame of eggs. This is a strong hive and I had decided to create a week split. I’m hoping the queen went in the weak split or she was missing in action all together for what ever reason.

News from the Week

All the Beekeeping Forums, clubs, and newsletters are a BUZZ with the news out of the White House. NO!!! The economy has not turned around yet. The big news has to do with the new garden and beehives been set up at the White House. “The 1,100-square-foot garden will include 55 kinds of vegetables, including peppers, spinach and, yes, arugula. (The selection is a wish list put together by White House chefs.) There will also be berries, herbs and two hives for honey that will be tended by a White House carpenter who is also a beekeeper.” (Read more in the Washington Post)

Meanwhile locally the flow has definitely been set in motion. The bees are working the orange tree blossoms, and the trees will probably blooming for the next month. The few intermittent showers all weekend have most likely been an improvement to the flow.

Some pictures from the blooms on my citrus trees.