Queen Troubles

Ok so the new queens were a 50% success. One hive took the queen but that damned wild hive did not. They released her form the cage and killed her. So I had to destroy the drone laying worker bee. I thought that the drone layer was gone but apparently she was still the queen bee of the hive. I could not see any eggs, so I assumed that she was dead or gone or stopped laying.

Hmm. As you can see from the lack of activity on the top picture - the queen and the whole hive is really at risk. Take a look at the lower photo to compare. This is also a queenless hive but is from a split that I made a few days before the queens arrived. It is still a little weak for this time in August. SO what I had to do was to combine the two hives into one.

In order to do this I had to move the whole wild hive about 100m away from the original site of the hive and dump and brush all of the bees off the frames and out of the box. The theory goes that if you do this then the drone layer cannot find its way back to the hive. That way you can install a new queen because the drone layer has never been out of the hive as a worker bee and will not be able to find its way back to the hive! I should have done this first. Ahh well, as mentioned in my last post the journey of a beeman is a long one! It was a $30 lesson. I will learn from it.

So when I combined the wild hive with the split that had the queen (rememeber my post about how I just about crushed my queen before replacing it in the hive?) I dumped all of the bees out. Olivia my daughter had a friend over and they had to vacate their tree fort as I was concerned that the bees would take some agression out on them. I was wearing my jacket, shorts, sandals at the time. I was a little worried when I dumped hundreds of bees into the grass, but being stubborn, I refused to go back to the house and get properly dressed. They did not bother me or them!

By the time that I got back to the hive there were field bees out buzzing around the place where the hive used to stand. I replaced the box and added the now empty frames and the bees took to it. The next day I took the box and combined it with the split that had the homegrown queen. I will see what is going on later.

Sotic lessons to be learned? Do you mess with nature - no, she always bats last. Try to work with her and help her. If you do not then you are fighting a power that will tolerate you but in the end correct itself the way she sees fit.