[bevy's honeybees]

I think the bigger problem was not enough bees. When I first put in the 2 frames there appeared to be enough, but I had other bee yard work and I suspect some went back to original hive. The 2 brood frames also had a lot of nectar and pollen, they being the outer frames of the box.

My weak area continues to be queen rearing. This morning I checked a nuk I brought home awhile back, 3 frames, 2 open brood, 1 pollen, and fed them (spilled) honey during the time it would have taken to make a new queen. Well I checked this morning, no queen or brood of any kind, but lots of bees. So I took the 2 frames with it's little cluster of bees and put it in with that hive. This may not work either, but it seems the least disturbing for both hives.

Maybe I should have put the 2 frames with existing queen and put them in the queen castle I bought last year, rather than a 5 frame box with empty frames.

I'm doing very well with swarm boxes and the occasionalcut outs I do are staying strong, along with my other hives are strong. Just this queen rearing I can't seem to do well. I might be at 50/50. Probably not even that well.

 

[bevy's honeybees]

I wanted to start some backyard queen rearing this year, in small quantities. I stopped buying queens for the first time. I tried a few starts last couple years with 4 and 5 frame nuks. I had a robbing problem, mostly. Even when I thought plenty of bees, very little success with queen cells I'd gotten started. So I bought a queen castle and planned to use one of my backyard hives for starting the cells and then moving them to castle. (save you the story) I moved all strong backyard hives in February so castle plan didn't happen.

I've done quite a lot of reading but I have a major problem. I basically can't see eggs or tiny larvae. I tried some open brood frames in hope of having the right stage, queen rearing that way and little success. If I could go to some class or somewhere where I could do it hands on for a few hours, maybe that would work but I know of no such place.

That's why I thought I'd take the queen out of the really strong hive, as that so far is the only successful requeening I've done. Remaining strong colony makes queen. I've done that with good results. Pull queen and leave them alone. But those hives are out in the country and I can't get out there as often as I'd like--even so, I tried in March in a strong flow where I moved a frame with capped queen cells into nuk, it failed. They tore down the cells and that has happened to me several times over the past year.

I've had a few successes with smaller hives, like a medium earlier this year that had 4 frames of bees, I added a frame of open brood and they made a beautiful queen. My problem is the backyard queen rearing. Now I have a strong hive in the yard that I want to use for queen rearing but I feel it's a bit late in the spring to try it, with the castle that is.

Back to the books, keep reading here, and I'm watching as much You tube as I can.
Thanks for the help.