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Subject: Orange County, NC Beekeepers

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: Tom Wright <twright AT vicksburg.com>
  • To: Harry Davis <harryfd AT hotmail.com>
  • Cc: ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [ocba] Supersedures
  • Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2010 17:21:36 -0400

As you have capped brood, you had a queen at one time. She may have been injured during transit or installation or is not producing enough pheromone to inhibit supersedure. You don't mention finding the queen. They can be pretty crafty and hide on the bottom of frames. If she's in there and you introduce another only one will survive. If it's the old queen, you haven't accomplished anything except waste money on a queen.

Suggest you go back and look for queen (watch for workers in a circular pattern facing the queen) or just let nature take its course with supersedure. If you find her destroy her and the supersedure cells just before introducing a new queen.

Tom

Harry Davis wrote:
We are "newbees" who recently completed the class and started with two hives.

We did an inspection today. One colony that we thought was the stronger one had about six supersedure cells. They were all in the center of frames. Beekeeping for Dummies says that this could mean you have a queen that is not performing up to par. Since this is a new hive with a new package and new queen, could this mean she did not survive? We know she was released from the cage.
The book recommends that you order a new queen. We found lots of drawn comb, nectar and/or sugar syrup, some capped but no signs that we could find of eggs and larvae. It is possible we could not see the eggs but most of the open cells appeared to have nectar or pollen.

In the second hive we found capped brood and larvae and one frame had the arch of capped honey. It has less drawn comb but seems to be doing better.
Any suggestions?

thanks,
Marilyn and Harry
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