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Subject: Orange County, NC Beekeepers

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: Elisabeth Curtis <granda.curtis AT gmail.com>
  • To: Orange County Bees <ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [ocba] laying workers?
  • Date: Thu, 16 May 2013 19:21:20 -0400

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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