foresttechie
06-03-2007, 07:24 PM
Help. I'm in over my head. I have received 10 mail order queens. I have 9 hives. I was going to do splits and saw one of the hives swarm. Caught swarm. Thats the good news. Unfortunately that means theres one hive without a queen for now. First hive I looked at after I hived the swarm appears to be a laying worker . All drone brood and very poor pattern with multiple eggs in some cells. Of the next 3 hives I looked in I could only find 1 queen. I don't doubt that they're there I just can't find them. I'm going back after this break to look for more but I'm concerned that I won't find enough queens in my boxes to make enough splits for the 10 new queens I have. A few questions. I have 5 frame nuc boxes. If I want to maximize the resources in the hive where I found the queen, how little brood and bees can I get away with installing a new queen on? Also, how long can I store these queens as they are while I look for existing queens so I can split more hives? If I open the shipping cage and lose attendants can I just add more? Should I change them? They have been in the mail for 3.5 days and here at the house for a day. Can I build a nuc and store the queens in there? Any advice greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading and responding. Rob