Discovered that hive was queenless (no brood at all and could not find a queen) so got new queen. Queen source said that if I laid the queen cage on top of the frames it would be easy to see if there was an existing queen. If bees were excited but did not seem aggressive to queen then hive is queenless. If they became very agitated and also aggressive to queen then most likely there is an existing queen. I have no experience to judge properly but they seemed to not be aggressive but would like the opinion of someone who has done this a few times in the past. The aggression at the end of the film is because they finally realized there was a large black object just a few inches away. The video is here: https://youtu.be/EOUJC80uiYE
Hi Steve, you need to make your video public. For what it’s worth, your queen source might be on the right track.
Were they sticking their proboscis into the cage?
Did any bees climb onto the cage and start fanning?
If so they will accept her in my opinion.
Aggressive bees swarm all over the cage and bite it
Sorry about that. New to YouTube. I thought it was public but it was private. It is now public Dee and Jeff if you can take a look and tell me what you think.
I plan on going back into the hive in 3 days to make sure she is out and then I will look again in a couple of weeks to see if there is any brood. One friend said it is not uncommon for a queen to cut way back on laying to keep the hive to a manageable size for the winter but it was pretty odd for there to be nothing. He said the lack of anything most likely meant no queen even with winter coming here in Texas. Sure is a lot more work than when my dad had hives over 50 years ago. We hardly ever looked at hive except to harvest.
Sorry the video was private. Have fixed it to be public now. Not much I can do at this stage but interested in your opinion for the future.
To determine if I am queen less I use the apivox, see link below
also here is part of a book he has writen, I am 1/2 way thru, vary good
The bees appear to be biting the cage. I wouldn’t be happy leaving the queen unless I had made absolutely sure the colony was queen less with a test frame.
How does it work Marty?
Can you explain what you mean by a test frame?
You take a frame of eggs and very young brood from another hive and put it into the suspected queenless hive. If they make an emergency queen cell, the hive is queenless.
I thought that was what you meant. It was my plan but I only had 2 hives and my second hive had a lot of problems and I ended up having to combine it with my main hive which is the one that I now think is queenless. I went back out today and although there were a lot of bees on the queen cage, they seemed to be very gentle. They had eaten almost all of the candy out but since I was there, I went ahead and released her and she seemed to go down the frame with no problem. I assume that I should wait about 2 weeks before checking to see if she is laying. Do you agree?
A week should be enough if she was a mated queen.
His paper and videos will give a much better description than I ever could but here we go
Mr. Eddie Woods during World War II Study and document the sounds that bees make during different activities. He was able to develop Recording and sound levels each of these activities. During swarming, The bees make a certain sound. There has been people talk about hearing clicking noises and that clicking noise has a specific activity it’s related to the bees and that is also been documented and this device glistens all for those sounds
If the hype is overheated and has carbon monoxide unit, The bees are making a different sound because they’re fanning a different way then removing moisture out of honey sells
If the bees are agitated for some reason they do make a different sound in any of the other sounds.
There’s been many papers written on this, Sergio has just taken all those papers and documented sounds and created a library that’s stored within your mobile device that correlates that sounds for different activities
During World War II, there was a BBC interview with Mr. Woods which I provided the link on here somewhere if I can attach it to this I will, But he talked about being able to detect a swarm potentially happening up to 30 days in advance
http://forum.honeyflow.com/t/apidictor-eddy-woods-hive-monitoring/8523