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Subject: Orange County, NC Beekeepers

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  • From: Amy Gusefski <amy.gusefski AT gmail.com>
  • To: ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [ocba] Advice on a weak hive
  • Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 20:02:47 -0400

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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