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Subject: Orange County, NC Beekeepers

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: English Family <englishfamily06 AT gmail.com>
  • To: ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [ocba] Cleaning frames with drone cells
  • Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2015 17:42:32 -0400

Hi,

I posted last week about a queen-less hive.  Thank you all for the suggestions.  We inspected the hive a few days after I posted and saw surefire evidence of a laying workers in our colony and no evidence of a queen, only eggs were laid 2-3 per cell and on the sides, etc.  The colony had dwindled in numbers and we were unable to find a queen or evidence of one.  All of our capped brood are drones.  As a last ditch effort to recover the colony, we did the shake out method and added a queen cell and frame with brood from a friend's hive.  We are not sure if this will work, we will be checking soon to see if our queen cell introduction was successful.  At this point, we are just going to wait and see.  

After doing the shake out and reducing the size of our hive, we have several frames with capped drone cells and no where to put them!  This is our only hive and the colony is quite weak at the moment.  We don't have room to add the frames with drones back in to the hive without adding another box, which we don't want to do right now.  So, I need some suggestions on how to get these "drone" frames cleaned up (we want to save the comb that is already drawn out) so we can store them for our next colony, or maybe this one, if they recover!

On another note, while looking for queen cells in our friend's hive we witnessed a queen emerging from her cell!  That was definitely a first for me and super cool!

Thanks!
Melissa





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