Hi All,
I've got a two deep 8-frame colony with two medium supers on it that overwintered well. About a month ago over a two week period the colony made two rounds of queen cells (some swarm cells and others right in the middle of the frame). I made splits with the frames with the queen cells and replaced the those frames with new wax foundation frames. In all six deep frames were replaced in the top deep box about a six weeks ago.
The good news is the splits made it and the original colony went back to work and has not made an attempt to swarm (no new queen cells). All of the replaced deep frames in the original colony have been completely drawn out and these all reside in the top deep box.
Now the odd thing: the queen in the original colony seems to want nothing to do with the newly drawn frames in the top box. She is laying in the bottom deep (which has nothing but the overwintered existing frames) and the first medium super (those frames also were drawn out last year). For a month now the queen seems to be moving from the bottom deep to the first super to lay crossing over all the beautiful open frame - from my eye the frames seem complete and ready to go.
Have any of you all out there seen this? Do you have any advise for me to get the queen to use the new drawn out frames?
Thank you for any help.
I've got a two deep 8-frame colony with two medium supers on it that overwintered well. About a month ago over a two week period the colony made two rounds of queen cells (some swarm cells and others right in the middle of the frame). I made splits with the frames with the queen cells and replaced the those frames with new wax foundation frames. In all six deep frames were replaced in the top deep box about a six weeks ago.
The good news is the splits made it and the original colony went back to work and has not made an attempt to swarm (no new queen cells). All of the replaced deep frames in the original colony have been completely drawn out and these all reside in the top deep box.
Now the odd thing: the queen in the original colony seems to want nothing to do with the newly drawn frames in the top box. She is laying in the bottom deep (which has nothing but the overwintered existing frames) and the first medium super (those frames also were drawn out last year). For a month now the queen seems to be moving from the bottom deep to the first super to lay crossing over all the beautiful open frame - from my eye the frames seem complete and ready to go.
Have any of you all out there seen this? Do you have any advise for me to get the queen to use the new drawn out frames?
Thank you for any help.