Hi all,
One of our hives has become queenless. Nothing but scattered drone cells and lots of drones.
We have a 2 month old caught swarm in a nuc that is going VERY well and we have combined it with the hive using the newspaper method.
My questions are:
When can I take away the bottom (old one with all the drones) brood box?
I assume I just shake off all the mostly drones before removaing the box and frames?
Is too many drones an issue for the combined hive?
The nuc was living right next to the queenless hive, and the bees from the nuc are understandably confused. Will the hive treat the nuc bees as intruders and will there be a small war on the landing board?
I think thatâs all.
Thanks in advance.
Cheers
Ron
Hi Ron, once you see a lot of chewed paper on the ground, you know then that the 2 colonies have combined. You need to act after a couple of days because if there was any fighting, there could be a lot of dead bees on top of the unchewed paper. That is a magnet for hive beetles. Also the drone brood in the frames is another magnet for them.
After 2 days youâll be able to treat the colony as one. Therefore youâll be able to weed out any undesirable brood frames.
cheers
Thanks for the reply Jeff,
Is an over population of drones an issue for a hive?
Was planning to remove the bottom box, shake the remaining bees (mostly drones) off and then freezer the frames to euthanase anything left alive in them.
Cheers
Ron
I hope not⌠I just added a frame of drones to a weaker colony. My thinking the will kick drones out as needed. They also make the colony âhappyâ.
My concern would be if the drone population is the result of laying worker⌠they may kill the queen from the nuc
Hi Ron, an over population of drones is only a problem from the hive beetle point of view. Remember that drones do nothing in the hive, defending included. Anyway at least you can put a stop to the increase in drone population by freezing those frames as you plan on doing.
As recently discussed, drones are accepted by other colonies. Maybe some of the drones will be accepted by other colonies in hives close to a DCA.
PS Ron, I recently did this to kill the drones from an angry queen in order to prevent them from mating. You can shake the drones into an empty super above a QE. The bees will go through, leaving the drones above it. In my case I just squashed them. However in your case you could remove the super with QE under it, then put a lid on, tape it all up before taking them to a new location. Then let them go, hoping theyâll find other colonies that will accept them.
Thanks guys.
Iâve seen a bunch of beetle larvae in the beetle trap under the hive. Iâm urgently removing the old brood box in the morning. Hopefully I havenât stuffed things up. The nuc Iâm combining with the hive is very strong so hopefully they can cope with some beetles. Iâll stick some traps between the frames too.
Thanks again for the replies.
Cheers
Ron
Hi Ron, I would work in an area where beetle larvae canât make it back to ground before checking every frame. I cut the affected comb into a bucket. It would be preferable if you had another brood box or super so you can put the unaffected frames into. After that completely rid the brood box & base of beetles, slime & larvae out of every crevice before putting the unaffected frames & bees back in.
You can freeze whatâs in the bucket, with lid on or put it in the sun to kill everything. I still render the wax down after a slime-out. I narrowly dodged a slime-out the other day. I must have beat it by a day or so.
Thanks Jeff,
I think I dodged a bullet. There was quite a bit of larvae in my beetle trap, but didnât see any actual Beatles. They must have been there, but at least they werenât in numbers that made it obvious. I think in a week from now it would have been too late. Slime City.
I did have a spare brood box so have just replaced the old one, and thoroughly cleaned the bottom board, which actually was pretty clean anyway. .
Fingers crossed. Thanks again for the advice.
Cheers
Ron
