No weather report or hive report today, instead I'm going to go over my plans on how to introduce an unmated queen.
Method 1
I'm going to make a split of one hive using only one frame, and adding some bees. I'll be inspecting my Piet Deweer swarm today and hope to transfer one frame of capped brood with bees to a nucleus hive where I'll release an unmated queen. I'll spray the bees with water to add them to the nucleus and the queen is now in a queencage inside the box the bees are going to be moved to.
The box has some drawn out comb, to let the bees store food in and to give the queen, once mated, a chance to start laying. It also has some sugar dough.
The frame we'll add to it must have capped and emerging bees, and hopefully some honey and pollen.
If not I might add a second frame with pollen and nectar.
- I'll be taking the queen in her cage out of the nucleus and will lay her on top of the frames in the cage.
- Once I have transferred one frame of brood with bees into the box I'll put the queencage on top of that frame, to see how the bees react to her.
- When the bees seem to be ok with the queen, as in not balling her, I'll then throw in 2 more frames of bees on top of the queen provided the frame had food stores; If not I'll add another frame with bees that contains stores.
- In case the bees are shaken on top of the queen I'll spray them with water and wait for a bit to see if they too are ok with the queen.
- I'll release the queen from the cage and let her walk into the hive.
- The box will be moved to another location on the same apiary, allowing the older bees to fly back to their own hive. And to let the queen go on a mating flight when she's ready.
As you see I'll not be leaving it up to the bees to free the queen, a risky business, but hopefully it will work.
This method can be used since the nucleus has the same size frames as my beehive I'll be using bees from. In fact, if you only use one frame of bees to move into the nucleus, you could shake (young) bees in there from another hive.
Method 2
I don't have Warré frames in my operation (yet) so I had to come up with another method of introducing this unmated queen. I consulted the mighty tool that the world wide web is and came up with 'a shook swarm'.
This shook swarm will be shaken directly into the Warré hive. The first box has frames in it, some are built out. The second box is empty to allow me to shake the bees in more easily I'll keep this hive closed to let the bees form a unit over a periode of 2 nights:
- Day 1: shake the bees in, keep the box closed and move it to it's location or keep it stored in a cool place
- Day 2: don't disturb the box, keep it closed
- Day 3: Ensure the box is in it's permanent location and open the hive early morning or late night.
Here are the steps I'll take for this method:
- Prepare the hive (food, drawn comb, empty frames)
- Queen in the cage on top of the frames from box one in the empty box 2 (super).
- Take young bees from (different) hive(s) and shake 3 full frames of bees in the top box, making sure you don't shake the queen from any other hive in there.
- Spray the bees with water and see how they react to the queen.
- If the qeen is accepted close up the hive and store it (on it's permanent location or cool) for the desired time before opening it.
Footage:
Here you can see how I did it:
Closing thoughts
I know there is a ton of different ways to go about introducing unmated queens and that most beekeepers will use mating hives to make sure the queen is laying before introducing her to a colony, this greatly increases the chances of acceptance. As it is I don't have any kind of mating nuc or other box on hand, so I chose to go about it in two different ways.
I'll keep you updated when I check on these hives, be it through the BuzzBox app that tells me (or doesn't) that the hive sounds ok in the coming days, or through a full inspection later on.
The hive I used to take the bees away from had a queen on one of the frames, I captured her and wanted to mark her afterwards, but that didn't work out very well:
That's it for today!
Bob Out
