Hi everyone,
I have 6 nucs that I'm going to try overwintering this year. Made them up in mid-July, let them produce their own queens and they've all been building up really nicely since then. Most are 2-stories high at this point (5 over 5 configuration).
Well, last Saturday I decided to mark the queens in these nucs. I'm pretty new at this so I decided to use a queen marking tube (the one with the foam-topped wooden plunger) and Testor paint pen. Got the first queen done with no problems. After that I went into nuc #2, marked that queen the same way but when I re-introduced her she got balled and killed immediately! I probably could have intervened sooner but I wasn't sure what was going on at first. It's the first time I've ever seen that. By the time I did break them up she was dead.
So now I'm trying to figure out what went wrong. I'm suspecting that the 1st queen's pheromones were transferred onto the 2nd queen while she was in the marking tube, masking her identity to her workers? Or, maybe the paint wasn't completely dry and the fumes pissed them off? I did keep her in the tube for about 10 minutes after I marked her...
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Rich
(2nd year beek in upstate NY, zone 5)
I have 6 nucs that I'm going to try overwintering this year. Made them up in mid-July, let them produce their own queens and they've all been building up really nicely since then. Most are 2-stories high at this point (5 over 5 configuration).
Well, last Saturday I decided to mark the queens in these nucs. I'm pretty new at this so I decided to use a queen marking tube (the one with the foam-topped wooden plunger) and Testor paint pen. Got the first queen done with no problems. After that I went into nuc #2, marked that queen the same way but when I re-introduced her she got balled and killed immediately! I probably could have intervened sooner but I wasn't sure what was going on at first. It's the first time I've ever seen that. By the time I did break them up she was dead.
So now I'm trying to figure out what went wrong. I'm suspecting that the 1st queen's pheromones were transferred onto the 2nd queen while she was in the marking tube, masking her identity to her workers? Or, maybe the paint wasn't completely dry and the fumes pissed them off? I did keep her in the tube for about 10 minutes after I marked her...
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Rich
(2nd year beek in upstate NY, zone 5)