[smccabe]

Today is 11 days since I put the Italian Queens I ordered from R Weaver into the hives after my very bad incident with defensive bees. I think I went overboard, though - really only the colony that requeened recently is aggressive, the others were normal, and they had been thriving and I was so proud of getting them in shape after catching/cutting out.

I checked today, and the aggressive hive had "Snot" or "Milk Brood" - thanks Dave - as did one of the other hives. The third hive, which had been blameless, now has 3 beautiful queen peanuts! And they might go out and mate with some other mean bees!

Any suggestions on what to do? I don't have a lot of spare bee boxes. I am thinking 1) order a new queen and mash the peanuts when she gets here (probably a couple days), 2) Order a new queen and put the frame with the peanuts into a cardboard nuc and fix them up later with a real box, requeening if necessary, 3) Give the frame with the peanuts to my neighbor who has lent me his extractor so often, and who has an empty hive, and order myself a new queen (this puts the risk of Devil Spawn bees on him, I know.)

 

[Deadeye351]

3.... Make him up a nuc with cells
2.... Order a queen and make yourself a nuc with the rest of the hive

 

[bendriftin]

I am certain I will catch a lot of hell over this post but here it goes. AHB can be utilized as a great asset, they will swarm often with no more than a handful of bees. Swarming behavior of AHB can be easily controlled from my personal experience. Take those mean bees and put one of the virgin queens in a nuc box with a frame of brood, a frame of honey, some pollen and a frame or two of bees and sit back and watch. She will start a heck of a colony. When all the frames in the nuc are getting close to being filled with honey, brood, or pollen order a new queen. As soon as you get a new queen move all the frames above an excluder and leave all the bees below. The AHB queen will be easy to find then, after a day or so. Then requeen the hive. Sometimes they can be a little difficult to requeen. My best luck has been to put a queen on a frame under a queen frame queen cage, after she starts laying good they seam to except them really well. I have found that AHB colonies are not too bad to work with as long as they are small, but let them get into large colonies they will be a handfull. Also giving them frames of undrawn comb works well in nuc boxes since they generally won't build drone comb when they are trying to get established.

 

[smccabe]

Those are both good ideas.
Deadeye351, you clarified for me what I needed to do with the word 'nuc', and I have figured out how I can arrange my spare hive furniture to make the split into nucs.
bendriftin, it seems you really understand how to take advantage of the lemons you get. I will invest in some hardware cloth to make a queen box.

After some thought, I realized that because my neighbor's hives are 20 feet from the road, I really don't want to give him the chance of any devil spawn bees.