What did I find here? This seems to affect only drone brood and is only on one frame with freshly drawn comb. Is this brood defective or did I just catch them in the act of capping the brood?
And this was a brood frame I used for making a split. A few days after putting three brood frames covered with bees in the new hive plus the bees of another frame brushed into the split, it got quite cold all of a sudden and I have the strong believe that they clustered on the brood but there weren’t enough bees to cover the entire comb, and so this part of brood got cold, died and dried out. Is this reasonable? WIll the bees clean the cells and use them again or do I have to dispose of this beautiful brandnew comb? It is like this for two weeks now…
The new queen in the split hasn’t begun laying yet.
The crusty, broken cappings on the drone brood looks a bit strange to me. Likewise the grub with reddish tinge. Have you checked them for disease? Like the ropiness test for AFB…
Hi !
Looking at your drone comb … I see no problem with drone comb … They seem to be sealing the drone cells. The drone cells appear healthy. I don’t see any disease or mite issues. Unless others see something other than me. I’d say your drones are okay !
G’day Angela, the top 2 photos look like the bees are capping the brood. The red in the larvae looks normal to me. On the bottom photo, it looks like there wasn’t enough bees to care for all the brood so some got cold & the young larvae died. I’m sure the bees will clean it out in due course. I’m wondering if some of that sealed brood will make it or not. Some of those caps appear to be a bit sunken. Time will tell.
If you do a split, even if you think you have enough bees to care for the brood, it’s best to take that hive far enough away so no bees return to the old hives. The other alternative is to lock them in for 3 days & use the branch trick. It would be good if you had bees somewhere else so you could use a couple of frames of bees to unite with that split using the newspaper method. An injection of more bees will help it to clean up those frames for you.
Thanks, so it’s like I thought with the dark spots - chilled brood.
I united this split with a swarm last night, because the swarm didn’t seem to have a queen. Used the newspaper method as I’ve been taught, but during the day my mother reported via WhatsApp that there was a big battle going on. Seems that the split and swarm bees started killing each other. At least those outside the hive. Some of the swarm bees escaped and could of course not access their own box, since they don’t have an entrance. Now my mothers terrace is a “mass grave”. I guess the hedgehog will have a party tonight…Took a short peek through the cover foil to verify that there are still bees alive in the upper box - they are.
I need to become more patient, I guess… Maybe I should have given the swarm queen more time to start laying. I just relied on me not seeing her nor eggs after one week. I thought that, because she was the old hive queen of the mother hive, she would lay shortly after putting the swarm into the hive.
