Hello everyone ! 1 month old bee keeper here . So long post ahead to describe my situation . I got my hive 24 days ago . It was a nuc with 5 full frames . On the 4th day i opened for inspection and saw capped brood and new larvae … everything was perfect … on the 8th day the tree beside the hive had a swarm hanging from it ( it must have been from my hive only as swarms are a rarity in my area ) . On the 10th day another afterswarm which definately left from my hive but disappered in minutes . On the 15th day i inspected the hive and it was completely devoid of eggs , larvae , capped brood … absolutely empty frames but the bees had built multipe queen cells swarm as well as supersedure … and the number of bees looked the same as before …on the 24th day ( today ) i checked again and saw the supersedure cell enlarged but cells with multiple eggs in them (3-4 eggs haphazardly packed . Not stacked upright ) . I am from india so i cant afford to just give up on the hive since i wont get any replacement for another year . Should i introduce a frame or two of eggs and capped brood ( its a 3 hour drive from my place)
Any help will be highly appreciated .
Are you keeping Apis mellifera (European honey bees) or Apis Cerana (Asian honey bees)?
I am keeping apis cerana indica bees … in india it is very difficult to find mellifera …even apis indica took me months to find and keep so thats why i have to find a way to make this hive survive
Well the Apis Cerana species is known to swarm more than mellifera, and they are also more likely to abandon their hives and migrate if conditions turn bad.
I am not sure if this applies to the indica subspecies or not.
It does but the wierd thing is that when i installed the nuc there were no queen cells so how did they swarm ? But more importantly how can i save them now from the laying workers ?
I honestly don’t know anything about the management of Apis cerana and I doubt there’s many on this forum who would.
I found this, probably the best I can offer you:
Thanks ! I had read all the info i could before starting apis cerana and from what i found its overall behaviour is quite similar to mellifera except the swarming behaviour . So what would you do if the same situation was for mellifera ? That would at least give me a few guidelines on how to proceed
You’re in a bit of a predicament…
Any new queen will likely get killed by the laying worker. But to suppress the laying worker hormones you need brood. So what you need is access to new eggs and larvae. It’s a lengthy process. Rusty has a good write up here How to fix a laying worker hive - Honey Bee Suite