Hot hive, stings and requeening…oh my!
August 4, 2020
This is the exact reason why I keep a blog because on July 26, Jeff and I are backtracking trying to remember what happened last week with his hive.
We went to the nursery on Monday, July 27 and Jeff found that his queen was gone and he saw she had been replaced by a feral queen. This is not a good thing because a queen that is raised by the hive will fly out and mate with 18 to 20 drones. If those drones are Africanized and aggressive, she’ll bring those genetic traits back to the hive. Because we have not been there for three weeks, the hive was already very hot and aggressive. When we were ready to leave after our inspection, we each had numerous bees buzzing around us as we walk to the car . They just wouldn’t give up so we walked between the rows of plants at the nursery and rubbed our bodies against some of the flowering plants. That took care of most of the bees… but we decided to get into the car with our bee suits on. Luckily no bees followed us into the car.
On Tuesday, we went to buy a calm queen from our friend Jay Weiss, and returned to the nursery to look for the feral queen and take her out. Just in case we could not find her, we brought a nuc box (small hive) so that we could keep our queen safe until we could find the feral queen. It was hot that day and although Jeff and I each looked at every single frame twice, we could not find the feral queen. We decided to put a queen excluder between the two main boxes. When we return, we could then look for the box that has new eggs and larva and will know that she’s in that specific box.
Jeff created the nucleus hive with two frames of bees, the queen cage, and a frame of honey. I was wrong in thinking that we would shake off all the bees because we actually needed nurse bees for the emerging brood that would be emerging soon. 😞
When we got home and talked about it and talked with our friend Les, I clearly was not thinking clearly… (am i still a newbie?). Jeff had to go back on Thursday to shake some nurse bees into the nucleus box. At the same time, Les suggested that we take an empty box and put every inspected frame into that box and that would allow us the opportunity to check the sides and the bottom of the hive to see if the queen was there.
Thursday, I had minor surgery, so Jeff returned to the nursery and shook some nurse bees these into the nucleus hive. The queen was all set then. He then proceeded to look one more time throughout the hive for the feral queen. By this time, the angry bees were even angrier and very aggressive. Jeff counted 35 stings on his leather gloves and still he could not find the queen. He packed everything back up, we return today to search again. Stay tuned!
We came to our bee yard and searched thoroughly for the feral queen, any larva or eggs. We were so happy to see that the bees were building supersedure cells to raise their own queen again. That was an indication that the queen was gone.
We still searched every frame taking off all those cells (about 12) and then determined that the queen is not there. No larva at all. We went to get our new queen out of the nucleus box and it appears that those bees killed her, through the queen cage.
We called the Valley Hive and we can’t get a queen until Sunday so we called Bill’s Bees and luckily Bill answered and said he had queen bees in his pocket! We are now going up Little Tujunga Canyon to his beeyard to buy a queen from his pocket!
We brought the new queen back to the beeyard. Bill told us to add some beeswax to the outside of the sugar cube to leave her in the cage longer. This will allow her pheromones to be more fully disseminated throughout the hive before the queen is released. The bees will have to chew through the wax and then the hard candy to release her.
Jeff reinstalled the extra frames that were in the nuc box. The honey frame looked as if it had been robbed. Hmmm… we’ll be back in 8 days.
