requeening frustrations

[sweetannie245]

Well, I'm about ready to rip up one of my hives and divy everything out among the others. I bought 3 NWC queens in late May(1 to requeen a Buckfast hive that swarmed, 2 spares). The requeened hive didn't like the NWC and made their own for the second time. The first queen was a drone layer, the second one apparently failed as well. I gave her 3 weeks and she was laying a pathetic pattern. Went through both brood bodies 3 times in a week to try to catch her, thought I'd gotten rid of her (no new eggs). Combined a nuc headed by one of the spare NWC with this hive last Mon. using the newspaper method. Checked them yesterday, no marked queen! Newspaper had been removed by the bees as expected, but couldn't find the queen. Found a very large queen cell almost ready to be capped, and several started queen cells in the nuc body. What happened?! The NWC was established and laying up a storm, with many bees in the nuc. The original Buckfast colony had weakened to the point where the two populations were basically equal in size (the nuc may have had more bees). I haven't had this much trouble with requeening a hive in 2 years.

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Christina Teague
Bennett, NC

[Michael Bush]

Wow! I would have said that's the ultimate in reliable requeening, combining a nuc.

Are you sure there isn't a queen in there and you missed her? Anytime things are a bit confusing, like a combine, they will often build supercedure cells and just about as often tear them back down when things settle down.

[sweetannie245]

My husband and I both went through the old hive twice together after I checked it the first time. The only bee we saw that even remotely resembled a queen was two worker-sized bees with suspiciously long abdomens. We killed both of them. What few eggs(two palm fulls) that had been laid in the colony when we added the nuc had been cleared out completely when we checked yesterday. I saw tiny little larva in the nuc frames, but no eggs. So, I'm guessing the new queen was present in the nuc as late as Friday or Saturday. We're hoping the hive accepts the queen that's developing now. The larva in the biggest queen cell was very well fed and almost ready to be capped. Neither one of us remembers seeing that cell last week when we checked the nuc before the join. Oh well, here's hoping for good news in a few weeks.

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Christina Teague
Bennett, NC