Hi Bianca, you are correct, the queens haven’t emerged out of those cells yet.
The presence of those newly formed queen cups definitely indicates, to my mind that the colony is in the early stages of preparing to swarm. It’s not a mater of “if”, it’s just a matter of “when”.
The best course of action, I think is to do a preemptive swarm prevention split, which buys more time.
Thanks Jeff. I thought the same, better to be safe. But I’m so curious to know how much longer after will they plop an egg in them, so thought to wait another couple of days and check again.
When I see that I act immediately, provided I’ve got the gear to do it with on hand. My reason is basically because I’ve opened the hive up, I might as well get the job done while it’s open, to save going in again withing a short period of time.
If I remove most of the sealed brood from a strong colony while doing a split this time of year, I find that I don’t have to go back in for another month.
I made a split on another hive this weekend (it had queen cells). The amount of drone brood it had was amazing, just about 2 full brood frames.
I wasn’t prepared with how I should split the drone brood frames across the 2 boxes but my quick thinking thought to keep the 2 brood frames with the mother hive so as to avoid loading up the new colony (with the queen cells) with the influx of drones about to hatch (as they wouldn’t offer much support for the new colony).
What are your thoughts and what would you have done?
Hi Biance, my strategy for when I find a colony preparing to swarm with queen cells is to take every brood frame, with bees, bar one. The one I leave will be the one with the youngest brood, just in case the queen gets accidentally killed or I haven’t found her. I place that in the middle, flanked with fresh foundation or fully drawn stickies. I break every queen cell down, then let the split make emergency queens. I take the split away so that no bees return to the parent hive. The split will probably need splitting, otherwise they could swarm with the first queen that emerges.
You wont like my answer about all the drone brood. I try to minimize large amounts of drone brood by using fresh foundation. If the bees mess it up before repairing it with lots of drone comb, I’ll cycle it out & start again.
Do you have any chooks you could feed the drone brood to?
I still get lots of drones in my brood which I leave, but not whole frames like you described.
What you said about the drones not offering any support for the new colony is spot on. They also don’t offer any support when it comes to harassing hive beetles. They will allow hive beetle to lay eggs in areas where a lot of drones hang out in the hive. We often find large congregations of drones on side of a frame or another, adjacent to where they recently emerged.
Thanks Jeff. I’m really enjoying understanding your approach which is completely new to me.
Why do you remove all queen cells so they create an emergency queen? I’m unable to imagine how emergency queen cells would be stronger than queen cells? Is there a downside to this approach?
Hi Bianca, it’s just my sense of reasoning. My thinking is that the bees built swarm cells for the purpose of swarming, so therefore the bees in the split might swarm with the first virgin queen that emerges, seeing as they are still in swarm mode. If they make emergency queens, my thinking is they will adopt the idea that they need a new queen because the old queen went missing, putting them in emergency queen mode. So therefore, coupled with the extra time taken to produce emergency queens, the urge to swarm may fade. However as I mentioned on the other thread, it’s not always the case.
It’s mainly during a strong swarm season that a nuc will swarm with the first virgin queen, and even then it’s just the odd one, just enough to be a nuisance when it happens. The rest of the season, it works out ok.
