Hello mentors:)
Haven’t posted in a while and hope everyone is doing well! My first year was full of challenges and success. My Saskatraz hive wintered well and with the cold spring in Illinois, made it tough to inspect the hive. Well, they exploded! I must of had over 80,000 bees in my flowhive. The frames were double filled with bees and made it very hard to inspect.(my fault).
I split the hive, but noticed only capped brood and queen cells and the hive was honey bound with no pollen coming in. Bees were more aggressive which was abnormal. I suspected they were queenless and ordered a mated queen as I didn’t want the genetics diluted. It took two weeks till I could introduce a new queen, but received her this morning. I layed the cage on top of the frames and they took to her immediately with no aggression and were easily moved with my finger.
I pushed the queen cage into the honey bound comb tilted slightly up with candy side cork removed. I left space between frames so nurse bees could feed her since I oriented the cage wrong when pushing it in. (Should have oriented it with screen side facing it down). I forgot to secure it with a rubber band . Worried cage might fall and obscure the screen preventing nurse bees from taking care of her. There are attendants in the cage.
Should I go in again tomorrow and secure with a rubber band or leave them for three days and then check to see if she was released? Will pushing cage into comb filled with honey be secure enough for three days? They have had a rough time with the split and losing their queen, I didn’t want to bother them again and have them kill the queen because they were upset.
Thank you for the input!
Nicholas
