What not to do when you are robbing your hives

[Queen Bee]

I learned a very hard lesson (that I already knew and just did put it in to the correct "file' (in my brain).

I recieved my queens yesterday and went to put them tonight. All was going so well. The hot hive was not too aggressive. We opened it up and took off the honey supers and got down to the brood chambers and began to look for the queen. DH (not a beekeeper--just my helper) (against his will most of the time) was cleaning up burr comb and raking it into a 20gal. tub. He really doesn't like the bees and While I was looking for the queen he went to the truck to take a break.... Well, I went thru one deep hive body looking for the queen. Taking my time and replacing the frames  I had checked. After about ten minutes, I decided she must be in the other part of the hive ---looked up to see 100k bees flying around robbing and fighting over the tub. They were everywhere..... every hive was covered , every stand was covered and every inch of the tub was covered..And the air was dark with bees... I closed up the hive, moved everything out of the bee yard and walked away.....  

I am kicking myself... I have no idea what I'll find in the morning (I was suppose to rob the other nine hives tomorrow.)  

Any ideas, suggestions, or "kicks" are greatly appreciated! Debbie

[steve]

Yo Debbie,
      kick #1; this time of the year is not the best time in NC to be exposing honey especilly if you live in the Piedmont area......BUT if you
must (ie) taking off your honey, always insure that your supers are completly covered, top and bottom......I use old hive outer covers, one to set the super (s) in and one to put over the top of the supers. When I srape the the burr comb it all goes into a sealed container.......
     Lastly, don't tally to long at one hive, do what you have to do and move on, preferably to the other side of the bee yard .
      suggestion #1 This time of year can be a trieing time to requeen as you have found out, one of the biggest problems is, aside from hungry boared worker bees is this is the time of year when the hive population is at it's highest......BUT there are a number of ways to find the queen in this maze, the first is luck, hope can find her on those first few frames,
         second, if you are running a single hive body system remove the hive body from the bottom board, replace it with an empty hive body,add two frames of drawn comb shake the bee off of the 10 frames from the original brood chamber into the new brood chamber, install a queen excluder over new brood camber and put the old brood chamber on top of the queen excluder....the next morning remove the top brood chamber and inspect the two frames in the bottom chamber for your old queen, pinch her head, put the hive back the way it was originally, 12 to 24 hours later you can in stall your new queen......
                                               Steve

[Queen Bee]

Well, the deed is done. We robbed the hives. I am very please with my honey! We got just over 300 lbs. and it is a beautiful, pale, amber color...  This years hives actually had 3/4 supers drawn and capped. I had to leave seven supers (on various hives) because they were not capped. So, I'll be doing this again in a week or so!


The hot hive was bearable . They were not too concerned with the new queen and her royal workers. Just going about their business.

There were several things that I will have to change about my methods of robbing them and when...

Everyone around here robs their hives around July 4>>>don't know why that's just how they do it and they say it is the best time.... Thanks for the 'light' kick! Debbie