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  • From: Lewis Cauble <lewis AT hivebody.com>
  • To: ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [ocba] Advice on a weak hive
  • Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 09:46:32 -0400 (EDT)

Amy,
The nice tight pattern of drone brood in your faltering colony would suggest an unmated or poorly mated queen.  Let's see if the bees take advantage of the frame of brood that you gave them to make a new queen.  Examine that frame about 4 days after you put it in and see if the bees have made queen cells.  If they are making queen cells I believe they will handle the issue.  It will take some time though.  I would give your faltering hive a frame of capped brood from your strong hive about once every 2 weeks until you see eggs from your new queen just to keep the population of young bees up a bit.
 
If you discover that they are not making queen cells with the frame of brood that you gave them, I believe you will need to find and eliminate your poor queen.  She may be hard to spot as she is likely unmated.  From there you may introduce a purchased queen or add a frame of eggs from your good colony and let them raise a queen.  Again, you will need to inject some capped brood periodically if you let them raise their own queen.
 
In your strong colony I would suggest moving a frame of foundation in to the middle of the brood nest so that they can draw it out and give the queen a place to lay.  Keep the food on them.  Each time you remove a frame of brood, replace it with foundation.  Again...Keep the food on them.
 
Let us know what your faltering colony does with the frame of brood.
 
Lewis
 

On April 21, 2014 at 8:02 PM Amy Gusefski <amy.gusefski AT gmail.com> wrote:

Well, one of my hives is doing great. It looks textbook, I opened it up today to check. The bees have gotten about 5 frames drawn and I saw capped brood, eggs and larva of all ages. The other hive is weaker and I need advice. They had a smaller population when I put them in the hive and they've kept using less food, which makes sense. However, they have an entire frame of drone capped brood, which I thought was a sign there is a laying worker instead of a healthy queen? I did see eggs in cells, just one egg to a cell and it looked actually pretty organized. I can't ID a queen on sight.

So it might have been a mistake, but I went ahead and took a frame of brood from the strong hive and gave it to the weak. My thinking was that the strong hive is very active and I hope losing 20% of their new workforce will be OK. If the weak hive has lost their queen, will they make a new one with the brood I just gave them? If so, will the delay in getting the new queen mated and laying be OK? If they have a queen but are just slow and mellow, I hoped that adding to their workforce would give them some oomph and get them going. And I so hope I didn't injure the strong queen!

What do you think?

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