Monday, July 4, 2011

She's Free!

On Saturday morning I decided to give a quick peek in the Pink hive, to see if they had let out the queen. I had put the queen cage in on Thursday, and it could happen. Well, this is what I found:


The queen cage was empty, with the candy plug eaten away! So the queen is in the hive, and hopefully she'll start laying. I didn't do an inspection on that hive, since if you disturb a hive too soon after introducing a new queen, they might take it out on her. I'll check things next weekend.

I also checked the Blue Nuc. In there was a frame of eggs I had moved from the Brown hive, and last week I noticed a couple of queen cells were built (which was the intent).

I thought to try to get two queens out of the deal, but instead of cutting out the extra cells (which apparently didn't work last time), I was just going to cage the queen.

I made a simple cage out of 1/8" hardware cloth, that you press down in the comb. Here are a couple of pictures:



So I wanted to put this cage around one of the queen cells, and then after both queens were born, one would be in this cage that I could move to the other nuc.

But when I checked the nuc, I noticed the queen cells were on comb which had some holes in it, so the cage wouldn't have kept in the queen. So I don't think it will work.

1 comment:

  1. I didn't know that about checking a hive too soon after a queen was introduced. Thank you for that info. I'm the type who would have to peak too soon and make things worse :(

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