Hi Kev, I highly recommend that you remove ALL the feeders. Because I feel that the feeders could be part of the reason your colonies swarmed. If you feel that a colony is low on stores, simply move frames containing honey around.
With the colony that has no eggs or larvae, simply give it a frame containing worker eggs asap, before laying workers develop.
With the other colonies, don’t inspect them until the time frames has elapsed.
You’re doing well Kev. There’s no reason why you wont finish up with 5 viable queen-rite hives. Don’t even think along the lines of “I only wanted 2 hives”, etc.
Since the only egg and larvae frames I have access to are the newly built out ones from the two swarms, is it possible that stealing one of their frames (each only has 2.5) will set them back too much? If I take one then they’ll only have 1.5 frames left and next week is July.
What do you think?
Hi Kev, take the frame that’s only half full of eggs. It wouldn’t matter even if you took a full one. All the queenless colony really needs is fertile eggs, or very young larvae less than 3 days old with which to create some emergency queens with. It can be a frame that the queen barely got started on. We’re talking my world. I’m doing these balancing acts all the time.
If you’re looking for honey production this season, you might need to combine some colonies. Having said that, you probably should still give the queenless colony resources to make a queen with, otherwise a laying worker might eventuate, which will create issues you don’t need.
I wanted to update this post because there was a happy ending to everything I went through and I wanted to once again thank everyone in the forum for their help and support.
All 5 hive survived and are at the farm thriving in double deep boxes. They just went through their formic pro mite treatments and will now start prepping themselves for winter. The new queens that resulted from all the swarming laid up the boxes so fast they had reached a very large size by August and I fed them very dilute syrup to encourage them to draw out all the new frames I needed for five hives, which they did.
So I started by buying 2 nucs that were sold to me with capped queen cells inside (we’ll never buy from that vendor again), and after capturing the 3 resulting swarms: 2 nucs in May became 5 double deep hives in September. A lot of extra cost in buying all the equipment and resources for 5 hives but I’m very happy with the result and the bees are happy too.
We’ve had a very wet autumn so far with high temperatures and there are flowers everywhere, especially in our swampy forest area which is acres of jewelweed, joe pye weed, and goldenrod.
That’s right, the nucs sold to us both had capped swarm cells in them the day we installed them and so the swarm instinct was so far initiated that it couldn’t possibly be stopped.
This is actually my second time getting nucs from a vendor that wasn’t a trustworthy source. Last year during our total failure at beekeeping (so much of a failure I don’t count it as a year of beekeeping) we bought a nuc from a local lady who sells honey about 15 miles away from us. She put all her diseased/distressed frames into a nuc box and sold them to us. The frames were so infested with small hive beetle and wax moths that they absconded from the hive we installed them into 10 days after we received them. She knew we were first years and so she took advantage of us.