I took 3 frames of brood, with bees, minus the queens, & combined them in a 10 frame box flanked by frames with foundation. This is part of my preemptive swarm control strategy. I bought the box home, which is far enough so the bees wont return to their original hives. Now I’ve broken that into two nucs by giving each nuc the same number of emergency queen cells. Spring has sprung here, well & truly, which is evident by the amount of brood on the frames. Here’s my video.
Great brood density on those frames Jeff! You didn’t mention what you did when you merged the frames from the two hives into the box originally to stop them attacking each other? Was this an issue?
Hi Sam, thank you. As long as you place equal numbers of frames & bees into a box with unfamiliar pheromones & mix them equally, one for one, they will call a truce & not fight. That was how it was explained to me by my first mentor, Clive Covey. I’ve always done it like that & it works every time. The 2 keys to that method is a box, lid & base with unfamiliar pheromones & (roughly) equal numbers of bees.
You can make a strong colony by taking, say one frame from 10 hives, that hardly depletes each of those ten hives, however with 10 frames of brood & bees like in my video, you’d need a second super real quick.
That is also a method one could use to combine 2 weak colonies instead of the newspaper method. Have the 2 colonies separated by one hive body before you do the combine, then place the new hive in that gap when combining. Basically the opposite to what I did here.
Good morning Kirsten, your most welcome, thank YOU!!!