[pokerman11]

I know this is an option question, but I’m now sitting on two extra commercial carn queens from a great local source.

I’ll set them up in NUCS for now, but in a month or two I need to figure out if I want to do a queen replacement with them (I’ll would pinch the existing queen and then combine the NUC with the hive).


The existing queens are in two hives that made their own new queen this year, so they are local mated mystery breed survivor stock (the hives were from swarm collected so not even sure what they were to start with).


What do you guys think use the commercial Carnolian queens or stick with the survivor stock queens?

 

[fish_stix]

Before you go pinching your survivor queens why don't you build up the nucs by adding capped brood once in a while and see if you can get them up to overwintering strength? Then evaluate the queens. You can always combine later. The survivors might end up being the best queens. Some of the swarms we caught last year that had superseded queens ended up being really strong boomers during the citrus flow.

 

[rweakley]

I would keep the newly mated queens from the survivors. Make the nucs as backups and as stated maybe you can get them strong enough to make it through winter. Most folks will tell you to requeen every year, I just let the bees make that decision for me. I get enough fresh queens from splits and such. I'm a hobbyist so I don't have to maximize anything. From that point of view the bees know best.

Rod

 

[dcatfish]

Before you go pinching your survivor queens why don't you build up the nucs by adding capped brood once in a while and see if you can get them up to overwintering strength? Then evaluate the queens. You can always combine later. The survivors might end up being the best queens. Some of the swarms we caught last year that had superseded queens ended up being really strong boomers during the citrus flow.

how bad is AHB in central fla, should we mark queens and re-queen annually ?

 

[David LaFerney]

I attended an excellent presentation by Ed Holcombe at the Heartland Apiary Society conference last weekend called "How to build strong hives for honey production". One of his main points was that to achieve that goal you should requeen within the next 6 weeks (July 10 - Aug 20 more or less) if your existing queen had ever been through a period of intensive brood production. I know that lots of people disagree with that but Mr Holcombe made a very convincing case.

I've posted a summary of my notes on this session here if anyone is interested - How to build strong hives for honey production

If you ever get a chance to hear him teach you should jump on it.

 

[Troy]

Ahhhh, yes AHB is bad enough in the Palm Bay area that he should requeen.

The African hybrids are all over Central and Southern Florida now. Not saying that an open mated queen isn't good, just that you can't know for sure.

Best Practices indicate you should Mark and requeen, just to be sure they don't hybridize with the African bloodlines.

So you already have the queens, use them is my advice.

 

[Tara]

Um... I wouldn't go making assumptions about the local survivor queens being Africanized if you haven't had any aggression problems. If you HAVE gotten a lot of stings with the new hives, sure, but if not, I'd say just make your nucs and have 4 hives next year.

He's in OH, not FL. Less chance of AHB there, I'd think.

 

[Troy]

ooops, yeah I misread that. In Ohio - yeah no risk of AHB there. My bad - sorry.

 

[fish_stix]

Troy; the orig poster is in Ohio! I'm the one who's in Palm Bay and still haven't had any problems with AHB. All you worry-warts have blown the AHB problem way out of proportion. Hope all of you realize that beeks in TX, AZ, NM, and CA have had AHB for quite a while now and guess what? They still keep bees in those areas and manage to keep European queens in their hives.