After I picked up the old deep box from Kathy Niven, I began to go over my plan of combining and look for potential problems. And I discovered one. A new queen usually does not mate for several days after emerging. But what would happen, I pessimistically wondered, would happen if she had emerged a day before they swarmed and then went out on her mating flight early and it just happened that she was out when I moved the nuc and then she would not be able to find her way back and thdae colony would die. A very far-fetched series of possibilities, but remember good ol'
Murphy. So I changed the plan. I would put the frames from the nuc in the empty box with 5 more frames as previously planned, but I would leave the box in same place the nuc had been. Then in a 2-3 weeks I will look to see if the queen is laying and if she is, combine the hives. Then #2 will have a new, young queen.
So two days ago, after coming home from seeing "
Embrace of the Serpent" (which I highly recommend to all of you), I made the transfer. It was very messy. The bees had built a lot of comb and stored honey. Removing the first frame was difficult and broke open some of the comb so honey was running all over. However, I did get all 5 frames into the box. I saw an unopened queen cell on one of the frames. The box is now where the nuc had been and the bees are coming and going.
The box Kathy lent me was old and a bit warped. I noticed the day after the transfer that there was a gap between the box and the bottom board, so I covered it in order to relieve the bees of the need to fill it with propolis. Also, I did not have a lid for the box (the original plan did not require one) so I had to build a
migratory lid.
 |
| The back of the box showing my fine carpentry |
The swarm seems to be doing quite well in Olea's hive. They are busy cleaning the old comb, have built some new and are taking lots of sugar syrup. The picture below shows the debris on the hive stand that they have dumped out of the hive.
No comments:
Post a Comment