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Combining colonies for main nectar flow

7K views 22 replies 12 participants last post by  beepro 
#1 ·
I understand that several colonies are sometimes combined prior to the major nectar flow to create a "super" hive that brings in more honey that the individual colonies would have. The queens from the individual colonies are removed so that the hive has to raise a new queen. The result is that for several weeks of flow the there are a lot of bees with no brood to care for while they raise their new queen which allows all the bees to focus only on collecting honey.

I assume that when the hives are combined with the queens removed that the bees will produce a lot of emergency queen cells. My question is this: In this situation would I need to worry about micro swarms from multiple queen cells or would the colony just choose 1 queen from the ones that hatched?
 
#2 ·
Here is how I would do it...
Instead of letting them raise queens and swarm, 9 days after removing the queen, I would go through and destroy ALL queen cells they have started, and give them a ripe queen cell.

You could go through and destroy all cells except for just the one best looking one. I would be careful of making them too strong, don't join too many hives together. You'll have to be the judge of the strength as you are doing it.
 
#3 ·
I was hoping to avoid the work of cutting out 50 queen cells......hmmmm.

Another option might be to combine all the closed brood with a single frame of eggs/open brood and leave the original queens with the rest of the open brood and some undrawn foundation. Come back in a week when all the brood is closed and move it to the combined hive. Leave the old queen and let them build back up to overwinter in a nuc. That way I could avoid the work of cutting out so many queen cells.
 
#5 · (Edited)
I was hoping to avoid the work of cutting out 50 queen cells......hmmmm.
**Or** After you remove the established queen,
you can wait 5 or 6 days and drop in a virgin queen if you have access to one. She'll go through the hive and tear down every single cell for you.

I've done this several times, but not for the reason of honey production.
I use to add a capped cell and a marked virgin at the same time, thinking if they didn't accept the virgin, the capped cell would emerge in a day or two in any case and would still tear down all the started cells. The marked virgin came out the winner every time and it became apparent that was just a waste of a good cell. It gives larger hives a decent brood break without going as far as making them produce a queen of their own from scratch and demoralizing the colony in the process of being queenless for so long.

The reason I wait a few days is so I know they are done making cells and they are large enough the virgin will recognize them as a threat.
I do this sometimes in very large older hives I don't want to break up, just want to requeen and clean up a bit with the brood break. I generally do it late spring after the old queen builds up population well, but before she starts to run out of gas.

I just pop the lid and direct release the virgin though the hole in the inner cover. A 2 day old strong, well fed virgin will be confident and is a good choice over a newly emerged blurry eyed virgin that hasn't hardened off or been well fed yet. But I've used both and have never had a failure yet.





There are several things you could do, but the question is, are they reliable methods and worth the effort?

Don't overlook the window before the new queen's brood is capped to treat for mites if it is needed.
Running a virgin queen through works wonders, but may not be enough to totally clean up the hive unless they already had a good wintertime brood break. I've not used OAV with virgins before, but I will try it this year now that I have my ProVap handy.
 
#4 ·
This works best if all open brood is removed except a single frame. It also has to be timed right or it will backfire. There are areas with near continuous nectar flows that this will cause the crop to be reduced because there are not enough of the right age bees at the right time.

It is important to remove all queen cells at the 10 day mark as Ray suggested. If more than 1 cell is available, the bees will often swarm repeatedly. If the new queen fails to mate, the colony will go downhill fast and won't produce much surplus. For this reason, it is preferable to give them a mated queen at the 10 day mark. One way to do this is to keep queens in nucs when you make up the combined colonies or purchase new queens if that is your preference.
 
#7 ·
The virgin queen suggestion looks like it _should_ be workable to me, too. What I don't understand (well, one of the things I don't understand) is why it should work completely, given that bee colonies are noted for casting multiple swarms under some conditions. I'm just not certain what that means other than that the first virgin queen out after the main swarm leaves does not without fail tear down all of the other queen cells.

Everyone is invited to educate me. I need it.
 
#12 ·
The virgin queen suggestion looks like it _should_ be workable to me, too. What I don't understand (well, one of the things I don't understand) is why it should work completely, given that bee colonies are noted for casting multiple swarms under some conditions.
And if they were Swarm cells it would be a problem, But if they are Emergency cells, the colony has no plans to/ no intention of swarming.
 
#9 ·
I occasionally make one of my strong colonies queenless to get them to raise emergency queen cells.
The foragers go rather listless and the colony definitely doesn't forage as well as when it was queen right.
On paper it might look like they should concentrate on foraging when you remove the queen and most of the brood but I find the opposite happens.
 
#13 ·
What I have done in the past with large overwintered hives, is just break them up into nucs and give them all a new queen cell. That works well to clean up the brood & backfilled comb. If your timing is right you can do that, harvest the extra newly mated queens after they lay up the frames well and recombine frames back into a large hive for your honey production. I'd keep the queen you select to head the large hive under excluder, additional frames of brood and feed above + supers.

That only works IF you are disciplined enough not to leave all the new nucs in tact! If you want increases that is great. That is exactly how I went from 35 packages to over 200 hives in just a couple years. But If you are like me and don't want any more hives, you have to figure out how to 'freshen' big older hives without spitting permanently. The virgin puts the hive in a position that allows treatment for mites to be extremely effective. Using OAV instead of something like Apiver really appeals to me too. Mark your treatment date on your calendar so you don't miss it.

Like I said, there are a lot of ways you can do this. But if you can figure out the exact timing you'll be Killing 3 birds with one stone. Freshen the hive, reduce mite load, increase honey production. But you have to do it all without demoralizing the hive and setting them back a bit.





 
#15 · (Edited)
I'd choose to leave the best mated queen out of the new bunch, if there is a noticeable difference.

Also should say, if you are breaking up the hive temporarily into nucs all within one yard, to keep the new nucs together right at (& next to) to the original location, so when re combining, they don't have much trouble reorienting to the newly combined big hive. It should be the only hive left at that location so all nuc field bees eventually congregate there.

I suppose you could even stack them, separated by a solid bottom and lid if you wanted, each level facing opposite directions so return of your virgins will not a big issue. THAT would be quite a sight! :eek:

I've never tried That, but hey, what the heck.

Some good colors for orientation would be helpful.
I use cheap fake flowers from the dollar tree or painted disk excluders for some of my mating nucs that are close together or in a straight row.

Flower Plant Cut flowers Floral design Flower Arranging


Yard Garden Backyard Flowerpot Plant


I don't want to paint all my equipment bright colors, so I use these flowers. I just stick them where they are needed here and there.

Plant Flower Tree Carpenter bee Plane
 
#16 ·
Lauri,
That (post #5) sounds like a great way to requeen a hive. I have a hive with lazy bees I am going to requeen with a daughter from one of our ambitious hives.

So, if I have the timing right:
On the 9th day, when I make up the nucs for the queen cells, I would also pull the queen from the lazy hive. Then on the 14th day find one of the new queens in a nuc, put a dab of paint on her, and run her into the now 5 day queenless hive?

Sounds too easy. But if it works, I like it!

Thanks.
 
#17 · (Edited)
Sure , you can do it that way. But you have to pull that virgin before she takes her first mating flight or she'll just return the the nuc she emerged in if she had the chance to orient to it.

I use an incubator to finish my cells between day 9-10 when I pull them out of the cell builder and right before emergence when I place them in nucs. This give me about 2-3 days to set them giving me easy access to the cells and assuring they will not get torn down if left in cell builder longer.



I let some emerge in the incubator in roller cages if viability is questionable or I have too many cells to place.
I fill a couple of the groves in the bottom of the roller cages with honey so when the virgin emerges she will immediately have food. Here you see I had added some royal jelly too, which the queens consumed, but I did not notice any benefit. I just add honey now.




After they have all emerged, if I don't have immediate place for them, I will put them in JZBZ cages and bank in a queenless hive until I need them. Overnight is good, they get well fed and harden up a bit. I'll bank them up to 5 days if needed, but the sooner you place them the better.

I can keep them up to 2 days in the incubator too as long as they have honey to eat. You have to put the honey deep into the groves and wipe it off well so the queens don't get honey slimmed. They generally do have a tiny bit of honey on them anyway and this could be one of the reasons I have had better luck with direct release than others have.

Direct releasing the virgin is easier if you use a roller cage VS a transport cage. Releasing a strong virgin through the hole in the inner cover allows me to let her walk out of the cage, but I can cover the hole with my hands to prevent her from flying off. A newly emerged virgin will rarely fly, but a strong well fed day old virgin may try it.








Here is a bank frame with both mated queens and virgin queens. Virgins are on the bottom right. You can see they are largely being ignored when in the presence of mated queens. I bank them separately now.

 
#18 · (Edited)
Because I focus on nuc and queen production, I overwinter many hives in very large configurations. They take care of the honey and the good drawn frames for me until I need them in spring. As a result, I come out of winter with some enormous colonies.



But I don't have swarming issues. Managing those large colonies & making very strong queenright cell builders has given me some experience with what I can get away with as far as intrusions without set backs.

These are current images taken late January.





Below, part of a cell builder colony. What you don't see is the second queen right box sitting on the ground. Once this box gets my grafts started well, I recombine the 2 boxes with an excluder between for the remainder of the finishing period. These colonies are very strong & crowded all summer, but never swarm and never get suppressed by my reorganizations about every 10 days.





I'm not an expert on what you are trying to achieve, but can offer up a few things I've done with crowded or large colonies that could be applied in your case.
 
#20 · (Edited)
No problem, I enjoy stuff like this. But I am in a slightly unique position where I have so many hives I've been able to take some risks. The results have been amazing, and I've become a much better beekeeper than I would have if I had been afraid of failures.

A lot of the odd ball thing's I've done the bees have thrived, I have failed very few times. But I did have experience before I tried too many of them. I did understand the basic behavior of bees, so if anyone is new, I'd advise not to do much of this complicated stuff until you get to that point.

Once you learn to overwinter successfully, the options for management really open up for you. Learning to rear queens early on was the best thing I could have done. Without having an unlimited supply of queens (in all stages) all season long, I'd be dead in the water for the most part, when it comes to growth and specialized management / experiments.

I won't go as far as to say virgin queens perform miracles, but I attribute lot of my success to them. They have an important part to play in my reduced need for mite treatments here. I am fortunate not to have other large apiaries near me so my drone population is decently controlled with my own stock.

Most folks are afraid of using virgin queens. Its too bad, they are missing out on those benefits unless they happen to be in a poor mating area. That's the catch.


Nothing quite like a newly mated queen to make a dark overwintered comb look good again




 
#23 · (Edited)
If you are not too new to beekeeping and can gauge your honey flow every year, then combining 2
colonies together BEFORE the flow to let them build up a bit will give you more honey. I use small 4-5
frame nucs to overwinter with a late Autumn mated queen about 3 months old. To the workers this is still a
fairly young queen coming out of winter. So the impulse to swarm is pretty much not there unless these nucs are
overcrowded on the flow. Gradually over the months leading to our early Spring flow, I will feed them patty subs and
honey water for them to build up. Then the stronger nucs will be combine into a full size colony and put 1 queen in a
small nuc hive. The combined hive will be my production hive with the strongest and most mite unfriendly queen inside.
After the honey flow I will break up the production hives for my graft queens. By then it should be around May or so. The
queen rearing process will continue until late Autumn again. So this cycle will be repeated again every year to grow my colonies.
 
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