In our second virtual hive inspection this year at the Morningside Community Garden, we saw the queen!!!
I do have a video clip of my falling and rolling down the hill, but I'm not going to share it!
A number of issues came up in our discussion as we viewed this inspection last night. Here they are:
1. Marking queens: It's great to mark your queens and if you can, you should for several reasons.
First, it's much easier to find her if she is marked. She does move a different slow regal way than the rest of the bees and she's 1/3 longer than workers, but she is very, very hard to find and marking her helps.
Second: There is a marking code for the color on the back of the queen. It determines the year she was born so marking your queen helps you know how old she is.
Third: There's lots of equipment you can get to help you mark a queen. Some items are the queen clip, the queen muff, and there are even queen marking kits.
The color for 2021 queens is white. Last year's color was blue.
2. Walt Wright devised the idea of checkerboarding.
3. Australian beekeeper on how to prevent swarming in your beehive. Remember his seasons are the opposite of ours in North America.
Why didn't you go through and crush all the queen cells? Or would that not prevent them from swarming?
ReplyDeleteHi Esther, I would never crush a queen cell. What I did do is make splits from both of those colonies as soon as I could, using the queen cell frames to hurry the split along. I left each hive with a frame with numerous queen cells on it so that they would not be left queenless. In one hive I saw the queen but you still don't cut the queen cells because the bees might be planning to swarm the next day and if I have destroyed or removed all of their queen cells, I have killed the colony because they will not have their queen who left with the hive and they would not have the insurance they have created to make sure the hive has a queen post the swarm. It is the biological imperative of the hive to have the drive to split into two colonies in the spring to perpetuate bees so I try to discourage them from swarming but never feel like it is my right to destroy the queen cells.
ReplyDeleteI should have said "they will not have their queen who left with the SWARM..."
ReplyDelete