BROOD NEST, QUEENLESS?, FEEDING? I have received a half a dozen emails like this over the past couple of weeks: “Hi Eliese, I moved my hive home a while ago to help fight against yellow jackets plus this is where I hope to overwinter them. I havent checked my hive since, but about 1-2 weeks ago they quit fighting so I suspected that something was wrong. For example, I went to feed them in the morning and no bees were outside; just 6 yellow jackets. I killed them (my herb scissors are the best weapon ever) and my bees came crawling out. Another time I noticed a single yellow jacket in the trail of bees walking into the hive. No bee paid any attention to the intruder. I just did an inspection plus sugar dusted my hive. It seems to be as I feared. I think my hive is queen less :( The good news is there is plenty of honey for them and they are still festooning, making more wax. I still have some clover & flowers so there are still a few foragers coming in with pollen plus I am feeding them sugar water. They are going through 4 cups of sugar per day. There is a wee bit of capped brood, but 90% of the hives capacity was honey. I took out two top bars & replaced them with empty ones” Here is my response “They are queen less if there are queen cells. The queen will produce less than 1 frame of eggs these days. Are there queen cells? Why did you take the top bars? They aren’t going to be producing much wax as the only thing they are using right now is the feed. Remember that your bees need to downsize population through brood production. This is a normal progression. It should be 65-85lbs of honey in there, in the single TBH. You should remove the super if you have it on. You want to be preparing for winter wrapping and prepping up feeding by the middle of this week. Temperatures are going to fall and you need to evaporate the excess moisture off of the feed you are offering!”
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 19:22:47 +0000
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