A few weeks ago I had a large colony that wanted desperately to swarm. I described on here how i made a tussenaflegger. That worked fine, in the first instance, but after two weeks after the procedure was completed, they again began showing plans to swarm away. more serious steps had to be taken. This next procedure is a bit exotic, but generally works well. The steps: 1-- Firstly, look through the entire colony and remove the queen, placing her into a 3-framer or 6-framer and place this to the side along with some frames of opening brood, fooding and pollen...as well as some foundation to keep those house bees busy. 2-- After 7-8 days go back into the now queenless hive and look through all of the frames and break out all of the swarm cells that the queenless worksters have made. With no queen present there can now be no more eggs or larvae from which the bees can make a new qieem. We call this condition, "queenless-hopeless". They are now desperate to make a queen so that they can survive. 3-- Next, you take three little plastic doppen from a Nicot larvae oversetting kit. You heat a small nail and press it into the dop (hull), so that dop and nail become one. Here you can see the three hulls with nails. 4-- In the hulls one places a new larve. Dig a groove into a newly built-up and empty frame, stick the hull with larve into this groove and it mimics the beginnings of a queen cell. 4a-- You do the same thing with the remaining two larvae, and place this into the exact middle of the upper hive box. Now you just wait 30 days and do not open the brood boxes in the interim under any circumstances. After 30 days, you can then have a check to see if the new queen has been fertilized and is laying. It is a process that one can do in minutes literally hopefully it will result in a healthy new queen with good qualities. In my case, I am getting larvae from a F-0 Buckfast queen which means that my queen will be an F-1. The queen is a good one and has the traits that I prefer. It is never a guarantee that the new queen will be a good one, but there is every chance.
This so fascinating. I thought that the bees could make their own queen by feeding it some kind of special food and the drakes with a different food.
Good evening, 2OF-- The bees can make their own queens, in fact they are making this one, it is just that I wanted to let them make a special`true-to-race` queen this time. They feed the selected larvae that will become queens Royal Jelly for the full time from when the larva forms from an egg...right through until their cell is closed (~8 days from lain egg to cell closure). The workers and drones receive some royal jelly for the first 3 days, but then this is stopped and they are fed a different mixture until cell closure.
Whew! After asking about the making of queens and drakes, I thought that I probably sounded pretty dumb. I know so little about bees that I wasn't certain but at least I'd learn something. Thank you for your kind answer.
No way, 2 OF--You didn't sound dumb at all. I think that if a person has never had a reason to study honey bees, they would not have any knowledge of the things that you asked about. Thanks for your question, miss.
