ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Orange County, NC Beekeepers
List archive
- From: Lewis Cauble <lewis AT hivebody.com>
- To: Jerry Schoendorf <jerry AT schoe.com>
- Cc: "ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org" <ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org>
- Subject: Re: [ocba] Questions related to upward migration
- Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2014 08:56:45 -0400 (EDT)
Jerry,
In my opinion, the bees are on a straight path to swarm city. Depending on how far along the swarm cells were on April 2, they may have already made the move. The mother queen and her crew will generally swarm once those queen cells are capped. If they have not left yet, I suspect they will head out soon after this rainy weather clears.
In my limited experience I have had some success doing small splits in this situation. I moved the queen and 3 or 4 frames of resources (without queen cells!) to a new box and left the new queens to emerge and takeover the old colony. I believe there is still a risk of secondary swarming where virgins leave with some of the work force. I thought I would be a smarty pants a year or two ago and prevent swarming by simply removing the mother queen before she left with the workforce. Seemed like a reasonable thing to do. It seems that each of the virgins that emerged swarmed and took a good sized chunk of the workers with her so when it was all said and done I was left with almost no bees in the colony.
I don't know exactly what you should do to preserve your honey production, but I would certainly attempt some sort of a split as soon as possible.
Lewis
On April 6, 2014 at 8:33 PM Jerry Schoendorf <jerry AT schoe.com> wrote:
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[ocba] Questions related to upward migration,
Phil DeGuzman, 04/04/2014
- Re: [ocba] Questions related to upward migration, Phil DeGuzman, 04/06/2014
- <Possible follow-up(s)>
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Re: [ocba] Questions related to upward migration,
Lewis Cauble, 04/06/2014
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Re: [ocba] Questions related to upward migration,
Jerry Schoendorf, 04/06/2014
- Re: [ocba] Questions related to upward migration, Lewis Cauble, 04/07/2014
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Re: [ocba] Questions related to upward migration,
Jerry Schoendorf, 04/06/2014
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