Sunday, August 18, 2013

Expensive Delays...

I'm behind about 4 posts, so I'm playing catch up. I've dated the posts based on the day I did the activity, not the day I am writing the post (yay Blogger!).

I have been talking for the last couple of years that I wanted to breed some queens. I wanted to increase my hives and maybe over-winter a nuc or two.

Well, like past years, the time has slipped away and now it's too late to start the process. Since I still want to overwinter my nucs, that leaves me to purchasing some queens. I called up my fellow WCBA member George O'Neil and sure enough, he had a couple of queens I could buy. So I took some of my honey money and bought two queens.


So here's my plan:
  • Take the queen in the Green Hive (last year's queen) and move her to a nuc
  • Put one of the new queens in the Green Hive
  • Take some frames from the Green Hive and make another nuc, and put the second queen in.

The idea is that I would have a good queen in the large green hive, and one in a nuc. The other nuc was last year's queen.

So on Friday I made the two nucs, moving the Green Hive queen into one of them (leaving the Green Hive queenless).

Then on Saturday when I picked up the new queens, I put them in their respective hives. Here's the Green Hive - look how the bees are all over the queen cage. They are excited to have a queen again!


Here is the bee yard now.



2 comments:

  1. Steve,

    What will you do with the first nuc with the old queen? Will you replace her later on or somehow let the bees do it?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I will probably pinch her and combine that nuc back with the green hive. I don't really want more bees from that queen - they are mean :-)

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