From: "deelusbybeekeeper" <deelusbybeekeeper@excelonline.com>
Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2001 17:36:14 -0700
To: <BiologicalBeekeeping@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: Re: How do you tell diseases apart

Joel wrote:
> Dee, Probably I just don't understand the shakedown process. But if one
> puts a hive body with new foundation under the existing stack, and puts the
> queen down into it with an excluder above her, doesn't that do the same
> thing as would "shaking down" the workers into it. I mean, they're going to
> follow her down anyway, and create new comb for her without any severe
> disruption to the colony. Is that drastic?

Reply:
In many instances Joel it will not work as you describe above.

Often times the bees will stay with the brood and the queen will be left by
herself. This is not so bad when the weather is nice and the bees are not
clustering, as workers will make sure that she is fed. However, shakendown
early in the season, or done in the fall, or winter months, this could spell
big trouble, because the bees if having to cluster for warmth, can not help
her while in cluster. Should your queen get too cold or not fed for too long
a period, she would easily die.

Another scenario Joel would be the bees staying with the brood and then
raising another queen. Then if you don't get back to check, you can lose the
one below and also have the new virgin corraled above and beyond mating time
for proper mating, then having you without a queen right colony again.

Another scenario Joel would be the bees staying wtih the brood, the queen
below and the bees being sick anyway, then getting sicker, as they would
still be on the old diseased unshaken combs, and no better for the situation
of what the shakedown is supposed to accomplish. That is getting rid of foul
brood.

Further Joel, in all the above, no new wax foundation is thus drawnout,
negating the purpose for the shakedown.

> Like I said, I probably don't
> understand what you mean by "shake down". Please help me to understand what
> is going on here, for I feel as I am missing something.

Reply:
So what is an "Old Shakedown" Chris and I are discussing? Well Joel, as we
(Ed and I) do it, it means restarting the bees with completely new
foundation from scratch, to force them to get over the EFB (or AFB also, or
para-foul). (Note: we did it/do it to regress colonies to 4.9mm foundation).

This is done by placing a queen excluder on the bottom board. Upon that then
placing a tight super, flush to the queen excluder and adding newly mounted
foundation to be drawn out, plus adding feed, if no major honey flow is
currently on to sustain the colony, until new combs can be redrawn and the
queen and bees are established again (2-3 combs with sealed and emerging
brood). Now Joel, it is new undrawn, freshly mounted foundation for a reason
here, especially for new beekeepers. The reason being, it takes about 48
hours for the bees holding honey in their gut, to really get into a wax
secreation mode for rebuilding the new foundation into drawn combs. During
this time they supposedly use up the old honey(burned internally within the
bees body) from the hive they were shaken down from. This is important,
because then the adult bees use up any contaminated honey(maintained in
their gut) and don't deposit it into the newly drawnout combs,
recontaminating it, causing the process to restart all over again. It also
guarantees that new foundation and wax will be produced for desired effect.

Now Joel, there is also a "modified shakedown" but mostly that is done by
experienced beekeepers and is accomplished with pre-drawnout clean combs and
salvaging of "clean frames" of pollen and honey. The key here being knowing
what "clean means" and how to recognize it. The disadvantage is you can
still keep a mild case of foul for restripping in 30 days. The advantage is
you keep some stores and pollen and don't have to feed and also give the
queen an instant place to relay to rebuild brood faster, especially if going
into winter. Caution here is: most don't know wht fully clean really is and
so the full shakedown is really recommended to most.

I hope this all helps you understand better. If not Joel, I'll try again to
do better for you.

Best regards,

Dee-