What a difference a change in weather can make. Maples, Elms, Junipers, Dandelions and Henbit are all starting to bloom and provide nectar and pollen. It was good to see my bees coming in with full loads of pollen. It was also good to get into the hives while the weather was warm.
I have not lost any colonies, but I discovered three that are apparently queenless. Since they all were fairly strong (5 or more frames of bees) and had stores, I decided to give them two or three frames of open brood with eggs and nurse bees to let them raise their own queens by emergency supercedure. Of course, the queens they raise will be open mated to whatever drones are available if the weather permits, so this is not a "sure thing." It may keep them going until I can get replacement queens at the end of April or so. If they did not have any stores available, or if they were too weak or depopulated to have a reasonable chance with help, I would have used the newspaper method to merge them with a stronger colony, which could then be split out when queens are available. If they do not raise queens, I may wind up combining them anyway.
The whole key to the emergency supercedure method at this time of year is having one or more strong (big brood nest and lots of bees, like 10+ frames of bees) colonies to source open brood from. It really does not do much good to turn a building, but not yet strong, colony into a weak colony to save another weak colony.
Also, beware laying workers who will leave eggs that hatch, if they hatch, only into drones, and they can produce enough queen pheromones to make the other worker bees feel queen right when they are not. That could cause a new queen to be killed by balling.
Hopefully, no one needs to be reminded of these methods, but they're here if you need them.
No comments:
Post a Comment