View Full Version : Surprise! Not what I set out to do.
It's 90 degrees with 80% humidity. Despite sbbs and slatted racks, my girls have been miserable. Hive #3 had a beard on & under the bottom board right through the last two nights and yesterday's rain! So when the sun came up this morning, I suited up (ugh) to at least take off the supers and cant the outer covers so they could have more ventilation. There were 4 supers on #3. 7 frames of the top super are filled but uncapped. The next 3 supers all had capped honey, uncapped honey, pollen--AND BROOD! Huh? I've got queen excluders on all my hives. I took the 3 supers and put them on their own stand & bottom board and made them into a new hive. I then inspected the original brood chamber which consists of two deeps. The top deep was conformed for brood (arcs of honey and pollen) but I saw no brood (I have trouble seeing eggs, though)but every frame was jam-packed with very fuzzy brand-new bees. By this time I was exhausted and in no mood to lift a brood box and the bees were in no mood for me to do so, so I put this one back together and added a queen excluder and the partially filled, uncapped super. So now the questions: (1) Do you think they may have made their own 2-queen colony and if so, how? I know Michael has said sometimes the queen is small enough to slip through. If so, my second question is: (2) Do you think she went into the supers and couldn't get back to the brood box? (3) Did I do right or wrong by separating them? The hives are right next to each other and I'm assuming the foragers will return to the original hive but that the nurse bees will stay with the new hive because of all the brood. I am also assuming that sometime in the near future I will have to summon my super-human strength and take off that hive body so I can check the bottom box for a queen or at least brood, right?
The good news is when I pulled a couple of the boxes apart I opened some drone cells and a study of the larvae revealed absolutely no varroa (God bless FGMO!). It was good to see since I'm reluctant to do a sticky board test even for 24 hours in this humidity.
Gregg
06-30-2005, 10:19 AM
1. IMO the queen got through the excluder.
2. Yes, IME once the queen gets through the excluder up into the honey supers, she will not go back down through the excluder into the brood chamber.
3. Depends on what you want. If the queen has been up in the supers for some time (which is what it sounds like), and there is no brood or especially eggs in the hive bodies, then the parent hive is hopelessly queenless. Options: give parent hive a frame of eggs to raise a queen (if indeed it has no queen or eggs already), or order a queen to put in it, OR (probably what I would do if this was my hive) search the honey supers for the queen (more than likely she is in there), place her back in the hive body below the queen excluder and reassemble the hive.
carbide
06-30-2005, 10:36 AM
Tia,
In response to your questions.
1) I don't believe that they have made a two queen hive on their own since you didn't see any brood in the hive body below the excluder. If there was a queen in there she would most likely be at or near the same level of brood production as the queen in the supers.
2) Did you put the queen excluder on before you put any supers on top of the hive this spring? If you didn't then I would assume that she got into the supers before the QE was in place. If you did put it on beforehand then the queen may have gone up through it and has not even tried to come back down if there was enough open cells for her to continue laying in the supers.
3) Is there open cells in the top hive body for the queen to lay in? If there are then I don't believe it is necessary to get into the bottom hive body since if there were a queen below the QE she would almost certainly be laying eggs in the top hive body at this time of the year. As far as seperating them, I think if you leave them seperated for too long you will have to re-combine them with newspaper when you have worked out your little problem.
I would search the supers for the queen. She is most likely in the bottom super since that is where the only brood is that you found. I would then extract the honey from the full supers, or not. After finding the queen I would re-combine the super with the queen in it back with the original colony using newspaper to be sure no fighting occurs. BTW, I would remove the QE since it obviously didn't prevent the queen from getting into the supers and now that there is brood in the lowest super, when the bees there hatch, the workers will most likely fill the cells with nectar and the queen will use the empty cells in the hive body to lay her eggs in.
Makes sense to me. I will find the queen and recombine tomorrow. It's way too hot & humid to resuit today.
<I would search the supers for the queen. She is most likely in the bottom super since that is where the only brood is that you found.> There is brood in all three supers, but it'll probably be easy to find the queen since the foragers will most likely have returned to the original hive. I'll put the queen back in the lower boxes, return the QE and put the supers with brood on top so that when they hatch out I can claim the honey they leave behind. Thanks for the help.
Michael Bush
06-30-2005, 12:16 PM
>I am also assuming that sometime in the near future I will have to summon my super-human strength and take off that hive body so I can check the bottom box for a queen or at least brood, right?
Or put a frame of brood in and see what they do. If they start a cell (which they will do in 24 hours if they are going to do it) then you know they are queenless. If not, then you can be pretty sure there's a queen in there somewhere.
I lean towards the "got through the excluder" theory. Natural two queen hives usually have both in the brood chamber and they are mother and daughter.
Yeah, the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that she slipped through. Tomorrow I'm gonna find her and recombine. I really don't want any more hives. Nine's plenty. Thanks for all your help.
Okay, took me over an hour but the hive is recombined. I'm soaking wet and shaking from the heat & humidity, but it's done. Didn't find the queen. Thought it would be easy with the foragers all returning to the original box and having only the nurses and queen with the brood but it didn't work out that way. I did move the deep and as you pros predicted, the two supers underneath were devoid of brood. I moved the deep to the bottom position, put the medium and two supers with brood on top of that, then a queen excluder (like it matters), one of the broodless supers, an Imirie shim and the other broodless super. Let's see what happens now.
I also scraped burr comb off the excluder and came up with a strip 1" X 12" of drone cells which I opened and inspected. Again, I'm pleased to say, no varroa. I then fed them to my chickens (never did that before--won't hurt them, will it?)
FINAL QUESTION: This is a huge colony. All but the outside frames in every box are covered with bees. And the queen's got plenty of laying room, so I'm anticipating more. Despite leaving the outer cover tilted, the sbb and slatted rack, there's a lot of them sleeping outside--even in the rain. Do I absolutely have to split them? I think I've reached critical mass at 10 hives and don't want this to turn into work.
By the way they all behaved very well despite my tortures. It was only after I was all done and took my veil off that one of the girls got tangled in my sweaty hair and kissed me on the head! Whatta hobby.
Why not remove the queen excluder all together and let the bees work it out?
<Why not remove the queen excluder all together and let the bees work it out?> Basically because I'm greedy! I'd like to get honey off this burgeoning hive but every frame that's been left available to the queen is at least half full of brood. The only things I could reap were a couple of honey-filled frames from the deep, and 5 medium frames from the two mediums. That's all the honey I've gotten out of this monstrous hive! If I took more, I'd also be taking brood and I don't want to do that.
carbide
07-01-2005, 12:21 PM
Feeding the drone brood to your chickens won't hurt them at all, just adds a little more protein to their diet.
You said that you checked the drone brood for varroa and didn't find any. Might I recommend that when you do this you also check the cells that the drone brood came out of as oftimes the varroa do not come out with the brood and there can be immature mites still inside the cells. You can spot the immature mites as tiny white dots moving around inside the cells. You may not be as mite free as believe.
carbide
07-01-2005, 12:22 PM
Feeding the drone brood to your chickens won't hurt them at all, just adds a little more protein to their diet.
You said that you checked the drone brood for varroa and didn't find any. Might I recommend that when you do this you also check the cells that the drone brood came out of as oftimes the varroa do not come out with the brood and there can be immature mites still inside the cells. You can spot the immature mites as tiny white dots moving around inside the cells. You may not be as mite free as you believe.
Thanks for the tip, Carbide. I'll check it out. Always learning. . .
I had the same problem with 1 hive. The queen slipped through the excluder to lay in a super. I checked below the excluder and found there was no room for the queen to lay. I just came back from vacation to check the hive. She now has room to lay below the excluder and is not laying in the supers now.
Well, dp, I'm not as lucky as you. There was plenty of room for the queen to lay below the excluder, but even though she slipped through the excluder one time, apparently she wouldn't go back through the excluder and down. So I physically moved her down into the deep, along with the supers filled with brood. I took the broodless supers which had been below the excluder and put them on top so that once they're capped I can harvest that honey.
dickm
07-03-2005, 02:26 PM
A friend asked me over to view a mystery. He had a strong 3 medium hive, a queen excluder and a super of drawn comb with some honey on top. He had a frame of honey hanging around the house he wanted to get emptied. He put an empty super over the top one and laid the frame on it's side on top of the frames. Lo and behold when he checked a few weeks later, the honey was gone and he had this one frame full of drone brood. It was easy to check this one shallow for the queen, and she wasn't in it. If she had been the other empty comb would have been full of brood. Suspecting bad stuff, I checked the rest of the hive and it was normal brood wise. Go figure.
Dickm