Sometimes when you install a new queen in a nuc they don’t always release the queen on their own. There is a layer of candy (similar to fondant) that keeps the queen trapped in her cage and the bees eat through that to release her. Strong hives can accomplish this in a day or less. For young, small nucs this can take more time and sometimes we step in to help them out. Here is how we released a queen from her cage into the hive.
You can see her come out of the cage at 0:49.
Supersedure is the natural way of re-queening. The bees replace an existing queen with a new queen in the same hive. There are many reasons that this can happen, some of the most common reasons are:
Supersedure cells will often be in the middle of a frame, not at the bottom of a frame like you would see with swarming.
In our case we believe the bees sensed the queen was getting old (she is over a year old now) and decided they needed to replace her with a younger queen.
It was truly a sad sight to see our good old queen right next to the cells of the queens that would eventually take her place.
You can see 2 large queen cells on the left and our old queen with a yellow dot towards the middle on the right side.
Allowing the bees to produce their own queen is usually not successful in our experience. This is due to the fact that we don’t have enough hives to produce a really good drone pool and the chances of the queen mating with an Africanized drone are possible too. So this hive will either be re-queened with a hygienic queen that we will buy from a local supplier or we will combine it with another hive.
I thought it would be helpful for some of the beginners out there to see a frame with some important elements pointed out. I’m also providing a link to the full resolution versions so that you can zoom in.
Frame with important elements marked.
Click here for full resolution file of marked up frame.
Unmarked frame for comparison.
Click here for full resolution file of unmarked frame.
A small swarm of Africanized bees tried to enter and invade one of our European honey bee hives. This is the second time we have been able to witness this interesting and natural phenomenon. The first time we witnessed a swarm trying to enter a hive was a year ago.
When we arrived at our bee yard and got out of our truck, we were met by a few aggressive bees. We thought this seemed odd since our gentle honey bees usually don’t chase us unless something is wrong, so we continued as usual to inspect our hives.
We opened up the first 2 hives and everything looked normal – the bees were calm and we saw eggs, a sign that the hives had a queen. We closed up the hives and moved along to our next set of hives about 25 feet away from the first set. Within about 10 mins I saw bees swarming – a cloud of bees flying around.
We rushed back over to see what was going on, and found that one hive was being attacked. There was a gathering of bees on the back of the hive and bees in the front of the hive were fighting.
Swarm gathered on back of the hive.
Bees fighting
Bees fighting
Bees fighting
As my husband took a closer look at the bees gathered on the back of the hive, he saw a queen! This was the queen from the small swarm. What are the chances we would see that!
I caught the queen to make sure she would not enter our hive and try to kill our good queen. In the meantime, the worker bees continued to fight. I put the queen to the side and after about 15 minutes the swarm gathered around the trapped queen and things started to calm down at our hive.
Queen from the swarm caught!
I put the queen aside and the swarm gathered around her.
As I walked around I found where the swarm originated from in a small tree close to our hives. Africanized bees usually have small swarm clusters that are capable of invading established hives and taking over. This is part of their natural behavior.
Tree where the small swarm was hanging out.
Since the swarm was close by they probably smelled our hives when we opened them up for inspection and were attracted to them. Before we left, we had to take care of the swarm queen. In order to make sure she would not invade our hive we had to kill her. Sad, but necessary to protect our hive.
We requeened a few of our hives this weekend. We buy our queens from a local supplier. I took a short video showing how we install the queen cage. You can see the bees immediately smell the queen and come towards the cage to release her. The tip of the cage is full of fondant. The worker bees will eat through this and release the queen into the hive. We usually go back in 24 hours to check and see if the queen has been released. If not, we open up the cage and set her free into the hive. The next week will be crucial to make sure that she is fully accepted and will begin laying eggs. It is best to leave the hive alone for the next 7-10 days.
Beelievable 