What to do about Queen cells

[ncross]

Hi,

This is my first post.

I split the swarm I caught last year about a week ago as it was quite crowded. I gave them more space and put the old queen and three frames of brood in a new box. I think I should have put some grass in the entrance of the old queens hive to keep a few field bees because all the flying bees went back to the old hive which is still strong. Still I am feeding the 'artificial swarm' and will give them some more brood of the other hive when they have more flying bees of their own. The queen is laying and I am feeding them.

A more immediate problem is the other half of the split. There were already queen cells being built and now there is probably about a dozen queen cells in that box. Some are now capped. I guess that any day soon the queens will start hatching. Should I let nature take it's course and leave them all in there? What will happen if I do that? I don't want to lose swarms!

The box with the queen cells is still strong and bringing in lots of honey.

Cheers

[ncross]

P.S. I am in Australia.

There were bees flying around the house as if they were looking for a possible new home for a swarm.

So, I bit the bullet and split the main hive again (the one which is queenless but has lots of bees in). There are queen cells in the top and bottom boxes so I hope to double queen them. I seperated them with a square of lino and a queen excluder. I would have but a super in between but I did not have one. The entrances top and bottom are facing in opposite directions.

I will get a super together asap and put a queen excluder top and bottom. I'll replace the lino with newspaper once I see queens laying top and bottom to reintroduce them to each other without a fight.

I still would like to know about what one should do about having so many queen cells though.

[ncross]

There is a small gap inbetween the top box and bottom box and interestingly the bees in the top box are humming loudly above at that point. This is to try and get more bees to come into the box above. Bees will do this when they have swarmed to get the bees to enter their new nest. Some bees returning to the bottom box are hearing this and quite a lot are walking up the walls and going into the top box. I hope they don't all go up.

[Michael Bush]

Swap places with the two hives.  You always need to allow for drift by either shaking in extra bees, putting both of them in a new place facing the old one, or moving the split 2 miles or more away for a week or so.

http://www.bushfarms.com/beessplits.htm

[ncross]

Thanks for your reply. An interesting article too. I probably would do as you say but at the moment don't even have the equipment to do it. More equipment arriving early next week.

They have settled down  a bit. I opened the top box and they seemed to have about half of the hive up there so I think they have split evenly. I gave them an extra frame to to give them a bit more space.

They are still loaded with queen cells if anybody has any thoughts about whether I ought to cut a few out or just let them do their own thing. I didn't go through them to see if any had hatched.

Cheers

[Jim 134]

Swap places with the two hives.  You always need to allow for drift by either shaking in extra bees, putting both of them in a new place facing the old one, or moving the split 2 miles or more away for a week or so.

http://www.bushfarms.com/beessplits.htm

  About 3 1/2 Kilometers or more



     BEE HAPPY Jim 134