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Subject: Orange County, NC Beekeepers

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: nina mcphaul <ninafargis AT gmail.com>
  • To: Lewis Cauble <lewis AT hivebody.com>
  • Cc: Orange County Bees <ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [ocba] laying workers?
  • Date: Thu, 16 May 2013 20:35:22 -0400

Hi,

We got our first hive last April. Very excited they made it through the winter. They appeared to be so healthy we added a super about 3 weeks ago. Unfortunately they left. We went there yesterday & they are all gone (: Don Hopkins kindly took a look today. Hive beetles were most likely the culprit. Interestingly enough, there was a queen left behind.

We have the frames in the freezer, will clean the boxes tomorrow. We are looking for some bees. A swarm or someone who is looking to get rid of some.

We know it's all a learning process but we were soooooo close!

thanks,

Nina & John McPhaul


On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 8:02 PM, Lewis Cauble <lewis AT hivebody.com> wrote:

The newspaper combine is by far my favorite method for fixing the laying workers.  It has never failed me.  In a week or two you can split them back out and either add a queen or let them make their own.

 

Lewis  

 

 


On May 16, 2013 at 7:21 PM Elisabeth Curtis <granda.curtis AT gmail.com> wrote:

One of our hives has the symptoms of laying workers -- spotty drone brood, no worker brood. It's clearly a hive in trouble. Two deeps and a couple of supers. Evidently adding a queen won't work as they will just kill her. What to do?
 
Michael Bush suggests shaking the bees from the hive in front of the other hives, divvying them up and dividing the frames between the other hives as well. 
He also suggests adding a frame of new brood from another hive at intervals and that usually by the 2nd or 3rd try they will raise their own queen.
He has a lot of other suggestions, but most of them he says rarely work and anyway I know they are beyond our skill/time level. One that he says usually works is putting the layer worker hive above a queenright hive with a double screen in between and then after 3 weeks, dumping the layer worker hive bodies out in front of their hive and removing the extra hive bodies. What's a double screen? Our other hives have at least one super; would we put the other hive above them? 
 
Shaking that many bees out of their hive doesn't seem all that easy.
 
Has anyone tried either of these methods? Other methods? YIKES!
 
Any and all ideas gratefully considered. --Elisabeth

 

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