Have just done a quick check to see if the bees have gone up into the supers since I took off the Queen exluder. The Queen has definitely been up - two frames had eggs in and I have removed these. I will leave the frames outside for 24 hours so that the eggs die (I wonder if that is because of temperature or lack of food?) and then I will put them back for the bees to clean out and fill.
Some of the other frames are filling nicely with pollen and nectar - others are still barely drawn out. Still, it's a start.
The problem is that although the Queen must have been there today, I couldnt see her. And there werent THAT many bees to make me think I had just not spotted her. So fingers crossed, she had gone down into the brood chamber when I opened the hive as the other scenario (squashed or lost Queen?) doesnt bear thinking about. I did put the the excluder back on and tomorrow I will do a brood box inspection. Yesterday's post somehow seems a lot less funny!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
What is the point of removing the QX and then checking for eggs just to kill them?
ReplyDeleteIf there are no eggs or brood in the brood chamber it sort of indicates that she has nowhere to lay eggs there, presumably pollen or nectar bound. More logical would be to move the frames with eggs down into the brood chamber.
Ah, I went to the Scottish bee keepers site and looked at the national hive plans and see the super size is shallower than the brood box size. In that case I think I would have just converted the whole super into a shallow brood box and moved the QX on top of it below the next super.
Having multiple brood boxes isn't an issue and the more bees there are the more nectar they will bring in.
That being said you can reach a point where there are too many bees which will force you to split the hive. I believe I have a hive that will be at that point by the beginning of May That's a Langstroth hive which now has 3 deep brood boxes with brood, eggs and store in all 3 boxes when I inspected it on Thursday. Ther are still about 5 empty frames that I moved from the oputside next to the brood frames but as there are 15 plus frames of brood and eggs there is obviously going to be an issue soon. To tran ad alleviate it somewhat I added a QX and oney super to the top to see if they would move stores up ther to free up more brood space. Hopefully at the next inspection there are queen cells which would aid in a split.