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Requeening honey bee colonies without dequeening

18K views 51 replies 20 participants last post by  Hunajavelho 
#1 ·
It's an early study that deserved my attention. There is no match in advanced title search. I believe it has interest to some of us.


REQUEENING HONEY BEE COLONIES WITHOUT DEQUEENING
By I. W. FORSTER* (Received 15 October 1971)

ABSTRACT
Two-storeyed colonies can be successfully requeened by raising
the original queen and the brood nest above a division board, rearing a young queen from an introduced cell in the bottom storey, and then reuniting both storeys when most advantageous. There is no need to
find queens, and colony manipulation is reduced to a minimum.


source: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00288233.1972.10421270?needAccess=true
 
#41 ·
The one that emerged on June 1st into a world where the days were getting longer. The queen after June 21 would emerge into a world where the days were getting shorter and would not experience that change. Honestly I suspect a newly hatched queen lays like a "spring queen" and the summer solstice is a convenient point to reference when requeening in the summer. No?
 
#43 ·
We are talking about the age of the queen with her laying ability. Whether or not she is a before or after June queen is still a young queen. Let's say you have a summer dearth coming after May then raising these queens may not be properly fed. This will have an affect on how the hive overwintered. Yes, location also take into consideration here and so is the specie of bees you keep. The early October raised queens only had a few short months to pack in the hive resources before the cold winter sets in. They behaved just like a Spring hive trying to expand but with the big fat winter bees. Along with the hive population growth so are the mites (if you don't clean out the mites) that will have a big impact on how the hive survive this winter. Somehow if you can removed the mites off the colony then it will be a normal winter bees build up. Without the mites to bother them all colonies survived this past winter. That is why I have concluded that a queen raised after the solstice here can carry the hive overwinter into next Spring. This is my 3rd year into raising the summer and late Autumn queens.
 
#47 ·
Where I get it from is a guy named Miller.
He muttered something about CC Miller the day he was telling me all about the post-solstice thing.
Guess I messed up by believing him. Turns out that all the people in the club I'm in don't really know anything at all including myself.
Am pretty certain that bees buzz but not so sure.
 
#48 ·
JohnSchwartz; Could you tell me which of Doolittle's books you found his references to solstice queens? I have been searching the ones I have and can't find anything about queens other than they should be raised after the warm up in spring, the time of the year when bees would be getting ready to swarm.
 
#49 ·
After the solstice or not we all know that a young queen will out produce an older queen. A well fed young
queen mated late Autumn will overwinter better. I'm not saying that an older queen cannot. Just that a young queen
can produce lots of broods during the Spring time and less likely to swarm in her first season coming out of winter. With a
young queen and swarm management I've never had a swarm yet. Production hive in 3 deep full of bees and never swarm at all.
Thanks to the young queens made late in the season that have no intention of swarming in their first year. I'm combining Palmer's nuc
method and Mel's late solstice queen method. Once you understand both method they are a right fit in our bee environment here.
 
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