Beemaster's International Beekeeping Forum
BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER => GENERAL BEEKEEPING - MAIN POSTING FORUM. => Topic started by: 2Sox on September 08, 2018, 06:20:32 pm
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I haven't had this experience before; that the queen was still laying and the bees had built supercedure cells. Is this common?
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Mr. Sox, supersedure occurs when a queen is failing, injured or for whatever reason is limited on laying. So the bees replace the queen. If the queen is killed, then the same process is called an emergency cell. Placement or location of the queen cell matters.
So you are witnessing, discovered, a kind of rare event. I wonder does the queen realize her faith is doomed??
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Happens more often than noticed. What is happening is the natural process of a hive requeening itself. Best to leave them to it. However, get a source lined up and in the queue to be ready to buy a queen and install in short notice. The supercedure may fail and the hive end up queenless. Have plan B ready.
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Happens more often than noticed. What is happening is the natural process of a hive requeening itself. Best to leave them to it. However, get a source lined up and in the queue to be ready to buy a queen and install in short notice. The supercedure may fail and the hive end up queenless. Have plan B ready.
Thanks to both of you. My plan B is a combination. This was a cutout colony that has been trying to re-establishing itself and hasn't really built up too much. Even if a new queen gets going the colony will be much too small to go into winter in good shape. It has absolutely no honey at this point.
I have two other colonies more or less like this one that I'm keeping an eye on. I'm presently feeding them all cutout honey and providing drawn comb with the hopes they can build up. Time will tell.
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What you could do, and probably should do, is do a combine now. Especially if you have other colony(s) that are lagging. The queen lays the eggs, but it is the bees that make the bees. The growth of a nest is limited by the number of bees looking after it. More bees make more brood and more brood make more bees and more bees make more brood and more ..... see the point? -> the growth of a colony is partly the queen but mostly the bees. Queens need bees to grow their nests. More bees, faster growth. Fewer bees, slow growth or stagnant. Too few bees (critical mass), contraction and die out.
It is late in the season. The likelyhood of a successful new queen is between very little and none. Also for strength build-up there is very little time left. A harsh reality is they have only one brood cycle to go then they will be in full winter mode. It would be best to make it a biggest brood cycle possible by combining bees.
You could do a combine and actually keep two queens working together for a couple weeks. Then kill the one being superceded attempt. Put a newspaper on the other colony. Put a queen excluder on top of the paper. Put the superceding colony on top, AFTER you have destroyed the queen cells, but not the queen. What you will get is more bees raising more brood and two queens laying. In one week check the top box for queen cells, destroy them. In one more week check the top for queen cells, destroy them, and kill the queen, remove the excluder, and reconfigure the frames into a proper winter brood nest arrangement. Then add a ton of feed to fill it up. Result is the combine but also with a large brood about set to emerge the following week. It may even be possible to take one or two capped brood frames out to help that third colony at the time you kill the upper queen and are reconfiguring the frames.
Just an idea. It will work stellar if you are clear on the plan, are up to it, and have the time.
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Honeypump,
This is really a great plan! Thank you so much. I'm going to study it and put it into action. Might even end up combining all three small colonies before I'm done. I haven't done a newspaper combine in years. I've found the double screened board to be much easier and mistake-free.
I like your suggestion of running a two queen colony for a while. Ingenious.
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Double screen board shares the warmth and the smells but does not share the bees. It helps with sharing energy efficiency but not in brood rearing in ways described. The bees are not allowed to conjoin and go to where the brood is that needs them.
For the intent of achieving a short term boost in brood rearing, you have to allow the bees to get together and to work together. That is the newspaper to allow the bees to join slowly without fighting. And the queen excluder to keep the two queens separate.
If you do not allow to bees to intermingle and join as one workforce, then do not bother doing this. The objective of a marked increase in brood rearing can only be realized by a larger cluster of bees accessing all the brood from both queens.
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So you are witnessing, discovered, a kind of rare event. I wonder does the queen realize her faith is doomed??
Why would it be uncommon to see eggs in a hive where a queen is being superseded. It also depends on how far along the cell is? I think we often miss this process because of the time of year it happens, at least here in the deep South (summer or after honey flow - less entries). Sometimes the daughter queen and mother will live together, two queen hive for a while, and both continue to lay. Eventually the parent queen is offed...
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I haven't had this experience before; that the queen was still laying and the bees had built supercedure cells. Is this common?
2sox- reading your post reminded me of this recent post. Read reply 7...
https://beemaster.com/forum/index.php?action=profile;area=showposts;u=4428
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SC{Why would it be uncommon to see eggs in a hive where a queen is being superseded.}
SC, agreed, seeing eggs and a queen would be common, usual, let me clarify: the supersedure process with queen, eggs, supersedure queen cell, all combined is what I was referring to as unusual. Yes this happens, but only takes 2 weeks and could be easily missed. At least I could have easily missed as I reframe from opening a hive unless there is reason and when I do inspections I usually only inspect the top 2 or 3 deeps leaving the bottom deep untouched most of the time.
Agreed again with ya SC on a hive with 2 queens. About 10 percent of my hives in spring run 2 queens. Are both laying and mated, I cannot say.
SC, one more thing, I appreciate, that is I adore, your quote of John, yes Sir.
Blessings
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Agreed again with ya SC on a hive with 2 queens. About 10 percent of my hives in spring run 2 queens. Are both laying and mated, I cannot say.
Yea, bee kinda tricky catching that one..... Blessing Brother