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Hopefully someone can clear this up for me:
One of my colonies quickly expanded with the flow and I started seeing QC's. This is a 2 year old queen and I decided to move her over with some frames of brood/stores as a split. The original colony, in addition to some hanging queen cells, made loads of emergency cells (the ones hanging up in the brood). I thought all was fine and after figuring my dates of emergence/factoring in mating flights etc decided to leave the hive alone until after I expect the new queen to be laying.
And then I just read something about cast swarming- though it wasn't very clearly explained. The suggestion was to reduce the existing queen cells down to one or two, squishing the rest. Can someone explain this, and is this normal practice?
Thanks
Brad
One of my colonies quickly expanded with the flow and I started seeing QC's. This is a 2 year old queen and I decided to move her over with some frames of brood/stores as a split. The original colony, in addition to some hanging queen cells, made loads of emergency cells (the ones hanging up in the brood). I thought all was fine and after figuring my dates of emergence/factoring in mating flights etc decided to leave the hive alone until after I expect the new queen to be laying.
And then I just read something about cast swarming- though it wasn't very clearly explained. The suggestion was to reduce the existing queen cells down to one or two, squishing the rest. Can someone explain this, and is this normal practice?
Thanks
Brad