A couple questions and a few thoughts for your consideration:
I am short on time today so please overlook the short form or take any as being curt. I hope you find the following supplementary to the other support and helpful.
First and foremost:
1). How many hives do you have and how many do you want? That dictates how many (if any) of these queens you will actually want to be spending time and effort into developing. From the virgin now today to her first emerging brood is going to be close to a month from now. Two months to a viable colony. Unless of course you are going to boost and nurse it by stealing resources from your other hive(s) - weakening the other hives and affecting your honey crop. If you have made up your 2020 beekeeping plan, the answer what to do with this should be readily apparent from that plan. Work your plan, stick to your plan.
Q/A: Have what you want already and want to stay as is? Pinch all the queens you have caught. Light spray the bees with water to minimize flight and shake all the bees through a queen excluder into an empty box or nuc. Catch any remaining loose queens found walking and scrambling on the queen excluder. Pinch off those as well. Take the box of bees, spray them sugar water that has a few drops of honey bee healthy. Spray them so they are damped and clamped. Cannot fly. Go shake distribute those bees on the doorsteps of your other hives. They will crawl/beg in, be licked off, and readily accepted.
Q/A: Want more hives, have extra equipment to fill, ready to put time and effort, and OK with weakening your other hives? OK, jump ahead and proceed with below.
2). Mated queens do go with the swarms. Never assume they are all virgins. The original momma may be in there. In an area with many hives swarming on the same day it is also possible for multiple swarms to congregate together, resulting in more mated queens and huge swarm clusters. First step is to cage all the queens and place them into an empty open frame, no comb. Open bar frame. Place the cages at least 4 inches apart on the bar frame. Put that bar frame into regular hive(s) with combs that have been setup with the swarm bees. Leave a bit extra space (1/2 inch) on either side of the bar frame. Come back in 1 to 2 hours. The bees will be clustering more on the cage that has the mated queen(s). The other queen cages will have walkers and attendants as well. However it will be VERY noticeable which queen has the most attention. That one will be mated. Set her up in a new hive, just like you would do with a package of bees. Place her cage. Shake bees through a queen excluder into her hive. Catch and cage or pinch off any other loose queens scrambling on the QX. If you catch more, you can repeat the test of caging and seeing if bees tightly cluster on one of them. Repeat.
3). A queen will not take mating flights so long as there are other queens present. You cannot keep the caged queens in the same box expecting a loose one to mate and lay. Remove all queens, cage, and bank them in a known stable queenrite colony up in 2nd or 3rd box above a queen excluder with the queenrite hive queen down below in the bottom. Ensure there are no brood or eggs above the QX, else you may be granted with more queen cells and even more virgins running around in the attic of your bank hive. Some bees will go up and look after the caged queens, their momma and main nest will carryon as normal down below.
Once you have all the queens sorted then you are ready to makeup mating nucs or kill off queens or some combination thereof. For the mating nucs, put one caged virgin each of the new nuc(s). Leave her caged for 3 days. Go back and put your choice of candy or marshmallow. Use a thin layer, one the nuc population can work through rather quickly. Then leave undisturbed for at least 2 weeks. Come back and check for success/failure by being blessed with a new laying queen or met with disappointment of a lost/failed queen. Hope for 10%-50% return your time and efforts. Combine the resources from the failures with the successes, setting them up in your standard hive body and configuration. Next, walk away entirely and leave them all bee. Come back in 2 months to find either a well organized robust hive or a runt hive or a problem hive. Promptly kill off the runts and any problem colonies. Promote only the self supporting strongest hives. Do not nurse along dainty wimpy colonies. Make ready what is left for the coming winter.
First: assess your numbers and your capabilities and how much time you are willing to commit to this. The hardest part is drawing that line and cutoff point. Resist the temptation.
Second: sort the queens as suggested
Third: makeup the nucs and carry on as would normally do with your queen rearing and hive building operations
Hope that is all readable and understandable.
Hope that helps!
Good luck with it, but most importantly have fun!
THP
Topic: Which Queen is mated? What to do with the others? (Read 1560 times)