Alright, so with the lack of my beekeeping experience, I leave alot to be desired for. My "booklearning" only gets me so far!
I have 2 hives that were trasnfered from 5 deep frame nucs. Going to all medium frame hives. I have 2 mediums that contain my deeps and the rest of the box is filled with medium frames. I have gotten to the point that I felt it was then necessary to add another box because of crowding. In order to rid myself of these deeps, I built my own queen excluders. I have determined that I will not be using them unless necessary, in such cases like this. So, I referred to Micheal bush's site about hardware cloth sizes. I used #5 hardware cloth for the exluder screen. I measured one at a local store and the dimensions are slightly smaller than the cloth. The hole size measures 1/4" for the hardware cloth, or 5 lines per inch.
So, when I did this operation, I found the queens in each hive and put the new box on the bottom. That way the drones could come and go. Put the exluder on after shaking the nurse bees and putting the filled frames in as well. Put the original boxes back on top the exluder.
Fast forward to today and taking a gander in the entrance every night and watching them during the day, my more aggressive hive is doing 1000% better than the more docile hive. Alot of activity during the day and looking in the entrance at night, almost all the frames on the bottom box are drawn out with bees all over them.
At this point, I'm lost on the sure thing to do.
I've considered that maybe I only have a few options:
1. Kill the weaker queen and make queen lure out of her, combine the hives for a stronger colony.
2. Order 2 queens from the fat beeman and replace the weaker hive with one queen and put a few frames from the stronger hive into a nuc box and have the new queen lay in that and build.
3. Try my hand at a 2 queen hive system
I dunno, its very frustrating to see the hive doing so terrible compared to the other. I looked under there before posting this and did not find any bees on the bottom frames nor any of the frames barely drawn out. Is it possible the queen squeezed through the excluder?
So, what do you beesource companions say?
I have 2 hives that were trasnfered from 5 deep frame nucs. Going to all medium frame hives. I have 2 mediums that contain my deeps and the rest of the box is filled with medium frames. I have gotten to the point that I felt it was then necessary to add another box because of crowding. In order to rid myself of these deeps, I built my own queen excluders. I have determined that I will not be using them unless necessary, in such cases like this. So, I referred to Micheal bush's site about hardware cloth sizes. I used #5 hardware cloth for the exluder screen. I measured one at a local store and the dimensions are slightly smaller than the cloth. The hole size measures 1/4" for the hardware cloth, or 5 lines per inch.
So, when I did this operation, I found the queens in each hive and put the new box on the bottom. That way the drones could come and go. Put the exluder on after shaking the nurse bees and putting the filled frames in as well. Put the original boxes back on top the exluder.
Fast forward to today and taking a gander in the entrance every night and watching them during the day, my more aggressive hive is doing 1000% better than the more docile hive. Alot of activity during the day and looking in the entrance at night, almost all the frames on the bottom box are drawn out with bees all over them.
At this point, I'm lost on the sure thing to do.
I've considered that maybe I only have a few options:
1. Kill the weaker queen and make queen lure out of her, combine the hives for a stronger colony.
2. Order 2 queens from the fat beeman and replace the weaker hive with one queen and put a few frames from the stronger hive into a nuc box and have the new queen lay in that and build.
3. Try my hand at a 2 queen hive system
I dunno, its very frustrating to see the hive doing so terrible compared to the other. I looked under there before posting this and did not find any bees on the bottom frames nor any of the frames barely drawn out. Is it possible the queen squeezed through the excluder?
So, what do you beesource companions say?