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pulled a queen with a frame of bees, problem

1436 Views 6 Replies 3 Participants Last post by  Tenbears, 
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I have hives out in the country and in one of my strong hives I was inspecting, the first frame I pulled, frame one, had the queen on in side of frame, brood, stores, bees but not loaded with bees on that frame. I had an empty nuk right there and it wasn't the plan but I decided to take that frame home, pulled another with some bees and brood. I want the remaining colony to make a new queen.

So the nuk had 2 frames and not a lot of bees but I thought it'd be ok. When I got them to my backyard I had another nuk that needed to be transferred to a 10 frame box, so I moved that one, put the pulled queen nuk in it's place so it would get the foragers coming back. I did that last week, and now this week we had a couple cool nights and I noticed today a big drop in traffic at the nuk. I went in this evening and it looks like almost all the brood got chilled. There's maybe 200-300 bees left. I also put in a frame of empty comb at set up, which was the middle frame and the two other frames in 1 and 2 position. I didn't look hard for the queen but she didn't get my eye either.

Not sure what to do. They are failing fast. I have a few hives in the backyard, should I take something from one of them? Wait and see if they sort it out?
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#2 ·
The foragers may not fly at cooler weather but chose to stay with the 10 frame box hive instead.
The proper way to make a nuc is 2 frames of bees, 1 frame of honey and 1 frame of pollen and the
new frame in the middle. Then brush more nurse bees from the other hives to keep things crowded until the new
queen is laying again.
The best way to do now is to go thru your several hives to donate more young nurse bees into this hive to make it strong again.
As long as the nuc is properly warm from the nurse bees the new queen can lay while these newly added nurse bees can tend
to them. Before adding the nurse bees make sure you have found the queen first. This will ensure that you
don't have a LW nuc hive later on. In the future be sure to look at the weather forecast before doing any hive manipulation.
 
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I don't know how much you have studied about queen rearing.
You have to do it the bee's way and not the human 'thinking' way to raise some good quality queens.
Once you give them what they want then you will get what you wanted.
Looks like this is an area you can improve on. With so many hives now you should be raising some early
queens in your area every Spring. Have you try queen grafting before? It is a fun and educational process!

Here are some good quality laying queens:
 

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