[FordGuy]

hi folks. i think i need some custom advice on this. i have 14 hives, 11 full hives and 3 nucs.

past year i de-queened 3 very agressive hives. requeening was to make more gentle offspring. i waited 24 hours and after exposing the candy, installed the NWC queens. only 1 of 3 took. The successful one initially was balled by the colony, and i could see them inserting their stingers, could smell the alarms smells. this is the one that would eventually be accepted and do fine. The other two - one was agressive, the other ignored her. Neither of the second two took.

fast forward to today - i am still stuck with 2 hot hives. what did i do wrong? we recently had a financial setback we did not expect, so i feel like i need to be more careful with these queens if i am going to try again. thanks.

 

[suttonbeeman]

It is hard to requeen full size hives with new queens and in my opinion the hotter they are the harder it is! Try starting a nuc over a double screen...make up a nuc using two or three frames brood. If in the summer or late spriong dont worry about brood chilling. Put the brood frames with a frame of honey over a double screen and let old bees return to bottom(make sure you dont have old queeen!) Then put new queen in leaving cork in!!! I never did remove cork when installing queen...waite about four or five days, destroy any queen cells in nuc and remove cork. Acceptance is about 90%. If you put new queen in a wire cage and let her start laying acceptance will approach 99%.Let her lay at least 10 days then find oul dqueen and unite with old colony using newspaper. It is very very difficult to requeen a full colony by just releasing the queen with candy....would be much better to use cage and let her start laying if you dont want to use the nuc method or even better use a queen cell Rick.

 

[Michael Bush]

>It is hard to requeen full size hives with new queens and in my opinion the hotter they are the harder it is!

I concur. The hotter they are the harder it is.

If I like the rest of the things about the hot hive and can't get them to accept a queen, I've often had good luck just dequeening and letting them raise their own. The daughter is often much nicer. But the simple soultion to queen acceptance is probably a push in cage and the most relaiable would be the nuc over a double screen board as described above.

 

[FordGuy]

i guess i don't understand a few details:
i looked at the double screen board on this site. one 5 frame nuc won't cover the whole thing...did you mean a full size deep box for a nuc?

where do you get the drawn comb? i won't have enough...is foundation ok?

when the old bees return, they are returning to their original hive, right? how do you keep them out of the nuc?

when you say you put the new queen in, you are talking about the nuc, correct?

thanks

 

[suttonbeeman]

place double screen on top of existing hive. Use full size brood box and start nuc. You may use foundation to replace frames in old(parent) colony. However dont use beeswax foundation if a honey flow isnt on....they will chew it up, use plastic or feed.(feeding will also help acceptance as it is always easier to get a new queen accepted during a nectar flow). You dont need ten frames in nuc, just what you start with.
The old bees will return to the parent colony on the bottom where old queen is. So they wont go up into nuc.
Yes put new queen in nuc.
Dont kill old queen until new queen is laying...she needs to lay at least 10 days and have capped brood before you kill old queen and unite. It would be best to wait about 3 weeks. Even when I start new hives or nucs and move them from Florida to Ky it is better if new queens have been laying two weeks...you will loose less queens if thier phermones are present in abundance.
After you have sealed brood find old queen and kill her and unite colony. It is even better if they are queenless about 24 hours. Although I dont always do it because of time. After another week you can remove the frames you put in brood box or some other frames and put nuc frames in colony and in a couple of months they should exhibit much differant temperment! Rick

 

[Michael Bush]

>i looked at the double screen board on this site. one 5 frame nuc won't cover the whole thing...did you mean a full size deep box for a nuc?

Either will work. A small board will easily cover the gap. A one by eight 20" long will fill in the gap on a ten frame hive left over with a five frame nuc on one side. But a "nuc" is just a "nucleus". That means a small oamount of the basic requirements for a hive. A small amount of bees, some brood, a queen, some pollen and some honey. This can be in any box and still be a "nucleus" hive AKA a nuc.

Here's an eight frame box on a ten frame hive with a board to cover the gap:

http://www.bushfarms.com/images/TenFrameToEight.JPG

With a five frame box, you just need a wider board or one on each side.

>where do you get the drawn comb? i won't have enough...is foundation ok?

A nuc has enough work and a small enough workforce to do it. Steal the drawn comb from the hive and give the hive some foundation.

>when the old bees return, they are returning to their original hive, right? how do you keep them out of the nuc?

You don't need to keep them out. They want to go back in the entrance they are used to which is the old hive.

>when you say you put the new queen in, you are talking about the nuc, correct?

Yes.

 

[tim71]

i do a lot of bee removals and alot of times the queen is killed or lost not intentional,what is the best way to introduce a queen

 

[Michael Bush]

The most reliable "simple" way is a push in cage.

http://members.aol.com/queenb95/QnIntroInstr.html
http://homepages.uc.edu/~knauerbm/A%20Year%20of%20Honey.htm
http://www.honeyflowfarm.com/beeproject/images/puchincagelarge.jpg

 

[Aspera]

I've had good luck with making a nuc for the new queen. Once everything is settled in the nuc, then I transfer the sealed brood from the hot colony over to the nuc. After a few good transfers, the hot colony is the size of the nuc, and the queen is easily killed. Earlier, someone mentioned a process with walk away splits in AHB hives. This would require even less handling of vicious bees, and as MB said, the daughter might be much nicer than momma.

 

[Michael Bush]

I don't think you can beat a nuc for a most reliable method that is least likely to get the queen killed. I'd probably do it if I had an expensive breeder queen. But the push in cage is almost as reliable for a lot less work.

If you want to requeen a vicous hive, break it up. Put every box of the original hive on it's on bottom board, about 10 yards from the original, with a lid and put an empty box back on the old location (with a bottom board and a lid) for the field bees (or one of the partially full supers that doesn't have many bees in it). Then you can wait for all the field bees to go back to the original hive and the bees to calm down. If you lay out the bottoms and lids first and then quickly pull boxes and put lids on as quickly as you can, you can usually do this before they get too bad. Even better with somone to help by putting a lid back on the original hive while you're moving the box with a lid still on it. If these one box hives (minus the field bees) are still too hot you can break them into two or three parts by pulling a few frames out and putting them in nucs. Usually the one with the most bees has the queen. Usually they are pretty workable once the field bees leave and go back to the old location.

If you don't mind losing a queen, and want to find the queen without so much work, you can also put a queen in each of the boxes (after waiting overnight) and in a few days look for the one with the dead queen in the cage. If there is only one, then this is the one with the queen. Find her and dispatch her, wait overnight and introduce a queen in a cage or a push in cage to this last box. They will all be instantly more workable because they are smaller and the only really hot one is usually the original one now, which is old field bees. You can give them a queen too. The old field bee hive won't take off quite as well, but it usually does ok if it's not too late in the season.

Of course it's too late in the year for any of this here where I am.

 

[tim71]

for give me ,im new to any type of forum i like to read to see the how too.ive been somewhat into bees for 25 some years but i havent had any bees for quitsome time(years) i didnt know a holelot when i quit,but now i need to learn,i may ask some realy dumb questions,if i do please bare with me.i enjoy what ive seen so for in your forums. thank you for the web addresses

 

[Zarka]

I had no trouble re-queening a very hot queenless hive last year when I discovered my queen was gone. Just put the new queen box in there with attendants and in a couple weeks saw lots of brood. The new queen was even a different race than the others--considerably lighter Carniolan.

I am thinking of re-queening again this year, but will probably do it later in the season. Last year I was forced to do it right at the beginning of nectar flow due to loss of the queen and probably missed honey because of that.