Adding queens to nucs questions

[NeilV]

Here goes another one of those "I already did it, did I screw it up?" posts.

I am making four nucs, which are going into hive bodies. I bought 20 frames of bees and purchased four Russian queens. Two of the hives are supposed to be Russian bees and two are mutt/Italians/dark looking bees.

Today is Saturday. I split the nucs last Saturday and left them queenless until the next day (Sunday). I did not take the caps off of the queen cages. The queens had been in transit and in those cages since the prior Thursday, so they have been locked up for 9-10 days. I think its getting to be quite a long time to keep them in cages and not laying.

I opened up the hives today. All four the queens and all attendants were in the cages, alive and well. However, all four hives had about 4-8 capped queen cells in them. In the hives with the Russian bees, the workers were acting friendly to the queens and attendants. I'm not really worried about those hives, even though the presence of queen cells was a concern.

In the mutt hives, however, there seemed to be an uncomfortably high level of interest in the queens. Just too many workers were hanging around on the cages. As far as I could tell, most of those bees acted friendly and were just feeding/sticking antannae in the cage. However, at least once I started messing with the queen cage, there were a couple of workers that were acting aggressive and trying to sting the queen cages.

I basically said "to heck with it, these queens have been locked up too long already." On every hive, I searched really carefully and tore out every queen cell. I then took the caps off of the queen cages and put them in there for the bees to release the queens. I figure that will take another day or two. Hopefully they will totally accept the queens during that time.

My questions:

1. Why are there so many queen cells in there? Is that abnormal? I've previoulsy bought nucs with caged queens, and they did not do that.

2. Was it smart to tear out the queen cells? My worry was that the virgin queens would kill the purchased queens. Also, I thought (without really knowing if it's right) that tearing out those queen cells could make the new queens more appealing. However, if the workers kill the queens, there are no eggs to make more queens.

3. Should I have given the mutt hives a few more days before uncapping the queen cages?

4. Should I do anything at this point other than leave the hives totally alone for a week?

Thanks, and sorry for the length and so many questions, but I did not want to omit anything that might help you to understand the situation.

[NeilV]

Just noticed that IndianaHoney is having a very similar problem in a pending thread, and he's got no answers so far. I'll check in on his thread also.

ndvan

[IndianaHoney]

Hey ndvan, I would recap those cages if I were you. If they eat through that candy without accepting her first, she's dead. You can alway release her manually if they make peace.

[NeilV]

I know. The question is how long can she stay in the cage and how do I know when she is accepted enough to be accepted. I feel like I'm in a tough spot on the two non-Russian hives.

[Ishi]

Get some #8 hardware cloth and make a push in cage at least ¾ inch deep. Make a 4 X 6 cage or there about. Clip the edges of the wire so that you have a single wire to push into the wax of the frame. Push it in deep to the mid rib over some honey and empty cells if you can and brood that is going to hatch soon. Make sure that there is at least 3/8 inch space from the brood to the cage is that they can’t sting the queen. I have had the queen lay in the empty cells if left long enough. As the brood hatches the young bees will accept the queen. They can stay confined in the larger cage a lot longer than in a queen cage.

[iddee]

>>>>2. Was it smart to tear out the queen cells?<<<<

In my opinion, NO, never.

You can now do as ishi says, or wait and hope for acceptance from 1 or 2 and use eggs from them to refire the others.

[NeilV]

I went back and checked on one of the two hives where the bees were not accepting the queens. They were acting friendlier toward the queen. They were maybe half way throught the candy. I am going to cross my fingers and hope that another day without queen cells does the trick.