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Author Topic: When to do it?  (Read 2507 times)

Offline Richard M

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When to do it?
« on: December 16, 2014, 06:00:41 am »
Hi chaps & chapesses,

I mentioned an ordinary tempered hive we have; my intention is to requeen at some point; only thing though is the schedule.

OK, well we're in southern hemisphere, about as far south as you can go in Australia, we have seasons.

This year is our first, we acquired our hives as nucs in January, just before everything locally stopped flowering which had us feeding quite intensively just to draw comb but they've done what bees do and I now have 6 supers on each hive with 2 spares with undrawn frames in the shed.

Eucalypts have just about finished, blackberries are in full swing for the next month and shortly to come is the  Prickly Box, so hoping to be extracting honey in mid-January.

After that, we're taking the hives 145km (90 miles) into the South West, where there are vast tracts of temperate rainforest with a huge Leatherwood bloom, where they'll stay until the end of March before we collect and extract again.

Ideally, we'd requeen this hive fairly soon but I don't want to interfere with either this honey flow  and we can't really check them before we send them away.

So questions:

If we requeen now, how much will it knock them back in terms of brood and hence honey production.

If we leave it until later, say March (equivalent to N. Hemisphere September) is this too late or won't they care?

Thanks


Richard


 

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