Bugger, I should have spoken to you before I ordered it. I didn’t think of that side of it.
Lots of wattle and paper bark flowering here along with the Banksia. Lots of bees flying in with pollen and nectar.
I am making a solar melter for the wax, I don’t expect miracles in winter but should save some power bill from the corporate thieves when the sun is shining.
It seems Autumn has arrived, hopefully for a short and mild winter.
Cheers mate
No worries Peter, I’ve put mine to some use since buying it, so it wasn’t a complete waste of money. If you buy an electric knife, don’t buy a cheap one. I still have one here that a lady asked me to try out a few years ago & hasn’t picked it up. I only did one frame with it, it got that hot after one frame that the honey on it started smoking.
Same here, lots of stuff in flower around here. cheers
My electric knife has a foot control pedal so I can control the heat.
Cheers
1 Like
Good news, I now have 5 hives with 5 laying queens!!!
Shaking out the 2 worker laying hives apperently worked. I also used my honey decapping roller and rolled over drone cells. I also removed and replaced a few frames that were really heavy with drones.
So I seem to be back on track other than this puts me almost a month behind with most of my hives. Might get honey from 2 of them. Depends on the summer. Last year honey kept coming in right through July but it was a wet summer. None are using the flow frames yet but 2 are almost full in the 2 deeps so they should start soon.
Thanks for all the advice everyone.
Joe
5 Likes
Well done Joe, that is good news. The shaking method worked for me also. I only recently tried it myself for the first time.
2 Likes
Hives are still going well. 2 of the hives are starting to put honey in the flow frames (one has 3 brood boxes the other has 2) and I just put the flow frames on a third. The other 2 (package hives) are still in single boxes so nowhere close ready, probably won’t be until next year.
I continue to pull out drone frames from the mess I had a couple weeks ago and replace with fresh foundation frames. Or I roll them with a decapper and let the workers clean them out. I left some drone cells but the hives had thousands of capped drone cells. I am not convinced that there isn’t a laying worker in one of them but queen is laying and doing well. She likes to stay in the upper boxes and most of the drone frames are in the bottom.
Also, I did find one queen cell in the 3 brood box hive but it was on a drone frame. I destroyed it for now, we will see if this is a trend or a fluke. Weird that it was on a drone frame. Has anyone seen fake queen cells on drone frames before?
1 Like
Hi Joe, you get fake queen cells in queenless hives with a laying worker. They are usually longer & more parallel.
It sounds like you’re doing a great job there. cheers
1 Like
Good one Joe, seems you are now getting things sorted out and you can relax a little.
Regards
Unfortunately I still have problems.
Hive #1 this is a big hive that I had put the original queen back in because her replacement didn’t breed and the hive was filling up with drones. So I moved the old queen back in with a few frames of her brood and her own box. I thought things were good but there is still lots of drones being laid. This hive has 3 brood boxes and the honey flow on top. The queen seems to only hang out in the third box that I moved her in and is laying workers in it. The lowest and the second brood box has lots of drones being laid and to by horror I found part of the honey flow frames are filling with drones. I don’t understand how there can be a laying queen and a hive full of laying workers. Help! I did move the third box where the queen chooses to live and switch it with the middle brood box hoping she lays in more areas. Also, I am using a queen exluder below the honey flow box so it has to be laying workers up there.
Hive 3 and 4 were the package hives that I shook out because of laying workers and then requeened. I inspected tonight and found 2 healthy queens and zero worker brood, only more drones. Why won’t the queen lay? Are there workers eating their eggs? I put some open brood in each hive for now.
Hive number 2 and 5 have lots of worker brood and seem to be doing well.
We are having some cooler weather this week so I am taking the opportunity to put mite away strips in each hive. I see a few deformed wings.
So how do I have hives with healthy mated queens and laying workers? Will the laying workers ever die out? Two different situations as I see it. How do I fix hive 1 with a laying queen but laying workers above and below her? And then the aingle box hives with healthy queens but zero worker brood. I have now doubt they were mated. Something else is going on.
Help please. Thanks
Joe
Joe, you need to reread this thread, everything has been previously covered. The other thing I would suggest is to only have one brood box with hive1.
Double check whether the drones are laid in drone comb & not worker comb. A queen will always lay drones in drone comb.
If you think you have a dud queen, you can kill her & leave her in the colony. Then introduce a frame with new worker eggs. The colony will find the dead queen, then will straight away get stuck into making emergency queens.
If you think you have a good queen as well as laying workers, what you could do is place the queen on a brood frame in another brood box on the posy. Then take the brood box 30 or even more meters away to do another bee shake. That’s what I would do. Then you can decide whether to use the new brood box or go back to the original one.
1 Like
I don’t know why the 2 smaller hives accepted the new queens but they have not laid any workers (or allowed them to lay workers). They have plenty of un-drawn comb and I scrape off any new drone comb (not all though)
Another interesting thing I noticed this morning. So last evening I put some mite away strips in all the hives and this morning there is a huge pile of dead drones at the entrance. I looked carefully and it seems to be 100% drones. It was 60F last night and not more than 70F today. Do drones not handle the formic acid as well as workers?
Are they all dead drones at the entrance? If they are drones their percentage in the hive population is way high. Have you got the queen excluder on top of the third box, or am I seeing something else? If that is the excluder then I would reduce the brood size to a single box and check if the progeny of worker bees increases, a thought is the queen may not be producing enough pheromones to waft through the whole hive causing a worker/workers to lay drones.
I am starting to think the excess of drone bees is because of an excess of drone cells on the brood frames and not the fault of the queens, How many queens have you replaced in that hive because of too many drones?
Just thoughts - regards…
yes they are all drones. I have been fighting drones and drone cells since they requeened (she didn’t breed because of cold weather) after taking the originally queen out. The original queen is back in and she has been a great queen and a prolific layer all Spring. When I merged her back in after killer the bad queen, I put a whole box in with her to give her plenty of her own loyal workers and brood to recover the hive. But she seems to be staying in that one box and the laying workers continue (I originally just thought it was the bad queen laying only drones). She is laying several frames of worker brood in her box but no where else.
So I am thinking I will remove one of the brood boxes, take out nearly all frames and give them all fresh frames to draw. I agree in thinking that maybe she hasn’t been allowed to spread her brood pheromones enough to command the hive properly. She has been such a heavy layer that my original idea was to give her plenty of space but I think I did it too soon. So I will compress them down.
Yes the hive is over run with drones but the formic acid seems to be taking a toll on them for some reason. Could be an unplanned blessing to reduce the drone population.
Yes I am running a queen excluder under the flow hive. The center frames are starting to fill with drone brood so definitely some laying workers up there. Not sure how I am going to clean them out.
So the QX is under the 4th box and above the 3rd, right? I have a raising suspicion that having 3 brood boxes is the issue you are suffering from.
What I would do is to make up new foundation and fill out a single brood box with that and just the queen with a QX on it, stores and what worker bees you have left will draw out fresh comb and the bees will bring down stores so she will be looked after. She will lay in fresh drown worker cells and therefore produce worker bees, how does that sound to you, still on this thread…
correct. I have to add some letters for this to send 
There is also a top entrance.
1 Like
The top entrance is not the issue, lets ignore that for now ok…
I only added the top entrance comment to let you know the drones that may hatch out of the flow hive have a way out.
1 Like
I understand, listen, if my thoughts sound valid lets set up a brood box with new wired foundation, assuming you can find the queen and set up for a single brood box and I think that will fix the whole problem you are suffering from. Ok?
Rob a couple of frames of brood and the nurse bees from other hives in the centre of the new brood box, smoke the whole hive heavily into each box so the nurse bees will be accepted. It is going 3am and I an really buggered so need to call it a night but I think I have gone thru this thread and the picture of the whole hive and seeing the QX made alarm bells ring for me. I will be back on same time tomorrow night.
Cheers
The drones will die out but the hive will need worker brood to survive so you will need to fit at least a couple of frames of brood and nurses. You could do another shake to get rid of the laying worker as well. G/night