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Caging a Queen

2K views 9 replies 7 participants last post by  little_john 
#1 ·
How long could I cage a queen? Like let's say I get 4 queen cells in a hive and I remove the current queen to see if those hatch. Put her with a frame of nurse bees and some honey/pollen, but I don't want her laying so I cage her. How long could she survive in the cage, if I kept giving her bees to take care of her?

I'm just starting to grasp the whole queen manipulation thing, so bear with me if this is a stupid question.

Thanks.
 
#3 ·
If the workers can reach her, she can be caged almost indefinitely. The problem is, is that eventually the bees will get tired of that after a while and they might think that she is a queen who can't lay and may try to kill/replace her. From their perspective, they have a queen present, but they (eventually after several days of caging) can't smell any open brood. I would not cage her longer than there is open brood in the hive. Once that last larva is capped and the queen is still caged, you may run into serious issues.
 
#4 ·
Why would you not want her to lay? Or do you just not want her nuc to grow. If the latter is what you want then that's easy, when brood is capped move it to another hive and move empty frames back to the queen. Let a little bit hatch out so she always has new nurse bees.
 
#5 ·
Why would you not want her to lay?
I too was wondering about that ... Also:
Like let's say I get 4 queen cells in a hive and I remove the current queen to see if those hatch.
I appreciate that this is a theoretical question right now - but would you be leaving all 4 q/cells in the hive ? 'Cause if so, then the first virgin to emerge will kill the other 3. If you want all 4 virgins alive, then you'll need to cut them out and either place them in an incubator, or into 4 queenless nucleus colonies (leaving the current queen where she is).
LJ
 
#7 ·
Thank you for the input. I'm just starting to think about the way queens can be reserved for emergency requeening, or queen management used for brood breaks to manage mite populations, or how one can utilize the intention to swarm in their favor.

I'm a scientist at heart. I like experiments. But I also want to manage the hives in a responsible way since bees don't live in a bubble. And, I can't throw endless amounts of money that way so I'm trying to make it at least self sustainable.

I have also been thinking about "How did they do this 2000 years ago? I know people stored honey, used honey. Somehow those bees survived under whatever those people did. Would it work that way again?"

When you look around the honey bee world, there's just a lot of things that seem odd to me. I do search after search and I find beekeepers that burn their skin, kill the grass around the hive and think the bees or the honey come out healthy. Or I find beekeepers that won't touch/manage a hive at all because that's not natural. It makes me wonder where they draw that line. Seems putting them in a hive is also unnatural if you feel that way. Seems capturing swarms from buildings would be unnatural. (If they are stupid enough to make a hive where owners would cut them out of there, doesn't natural selection say they should perish?) I'm trying to find the common sense middle ground. The place where cattle graze on rotating grasslands, and in hooving up the soil creates a healthy, biodiverse ecosystem that benefits all life forms. The place where the animals are still cared for and respected and yet utilized....for the health of all.
 
#8 ·
I have also been thinking about "How did they do this 2000 years ago? I know people stored honey, used honey. Somehow those bees survived under whatever those people did. Would it work that way again?" .
But would you want to ? Right up until the Middle Ages (and beyond that, in some places) honeybee colonies were killed wholesale in order to harvest their honey. I wouldn't want to be part of that.

And anyway, over the millennia values changed: honey used to be highly prized as it was the only commonly available source of culinary sweetness - then sugar cane and sugar beet processed on an industrial scale largely replaced it. You can't put those clocks back.

And with regard to Natural Selection - do bear in mind that we humans are an integral part of that dynamic, and not outside of it, looking on as spectators - as some would have us believe.
LJ
 
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