This makes fascinating reading Paul - many thanks. I didn't know that
there might be virgin queens around at this time of the year - but it
does give a point to the drones in my hive...
Gilliane
On 17/09/2020 11:58, Helen Nunn wrote:
Hi Paul
Reading this was so interesting. Here's me looking forward to next year and harvesting a boxful from a Warre instead of a TBH!
Can I ask a question: would your clearer box have been useful, after you got the young queen back to the main hive?
Helen
On Thu, 17 Sep 2020 at 11:39, Oxnatbees <oxnatbees@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:oxnatbees@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
A couple of days ago I harvested a box of honey from my big Warre
colony.
I had just checked some details of the procedure with Gareth as
it's a year since I did this. One thing he stressed was, get all
bees out. I didn't foresee a problem with this as the only time I
ever did, was the time I did not check carefully enough for brood
first. (Nurse bees won't readily abandon brood.)
So, I looked through windows. Loads of honey in top 2 boxes,
great. Not many bees in top box, great, unlikely to be brood there.
Lifted top box and checked bottom of centre combs. No brood. Good.
(And indeed there were no brood in it, that is not what went awry
in this story, but I am describing the process to help other Warre
users visualise the steps.)
So I smoked the remaining bees out and into the parent hive. This
was a bit tricky due to the box weight, layout of the garden and
height of the 5 box stack, but Gareth had emphasised young bees
can't fly, and will get lost in grass, it is essential to get them
back in or on the hive. At the time I thought I got 90% out this way.
I then took the box to a table 2m away with the intention of
smoking the last few out onto a large sheet of cardboard for
ferrying back to the hive, and it was here the fun began. Because
there were still a surprising number of bees in there. This box
had been on the hive 2-3 years and the combs, though straight,
were welded to the sides by rock hard comb and it was not feasible
to cut them out and brush them off, I would have killed many bees
and attracted robbers to spilled honey. So smoke and a long poky
feather were the tools of choice.
Oh hang on. What's this, after 10 minutes of a seemingly endless
supply of bees coming out in drips and drabs? Oh my. A young queen
popped out, and straight back in again.
Let's just review that for a moment. My bees are like dark
buckfasts in colouring and the queens start out as yellow-orange
virgins, before eventually darkening to near black and becoming
invisible in the crowds. So young queens stand out like someone
wearing a day-glo jacket, and are huge compared to workers. It was
definitely a queen.
Look back at hive. Contented - not queenless. Mother of this queen
(or a rival young one) presumably still in there.
Another fact: queens don't cross honey (no point, they don't lay
brood in honey). This is why I originally checked the second box
for honey - it had a band of capped honey at the top so the queen
would be below there. So this young queen was "breaking the
rules", presumably not in lay yet and maybe hiding from another
queen? Maybe the workers had corralled her up there away from
their first choice as insurance in case her sister didn't mate
successfully? Anyway the point is - once again the bees weren't
reading the books.
Be that as it may, it was essential to get this queen back in the
hive. She /might/ be their only queen, or she /might/ be being
prepped to succeed her mother before winter. If the colony have
kept her alive, they have a reason.
Well, it took another 20-30 minutes to get her out because queens
are nervous of light and if trouble begins, their job is to run
for cover while workers fight it off. But eventually I got her in
a queen clip and released her at the hive entrance. There was a
bit of a scrum of guard bees round her and she disappeared inside.
This still left bees in the box. I have not seen this before. It
was just honey, but some wouldn't leave, perhaps because of that
queen's smell. I could look right through the box, there were gaps
between combs but you could see a few hiding behind brace comb
etc. Eventually I had to cut the comb out, and I decided to do
this outside rather than fill the kitchen with bees. This
attracted clouds of robbers and it was quite tricky and, I'm
ashamed to say, some bees died. So what have I learned?
* Young queens can hide in areas you don't expect.
* It is a heck of a lot easier to harvest a TBH where you can
take one comb out at a time and brush bees back into the hive.
* I need to improve the way I get bees out of such Warre boxes.
* You can pack an amazing number of bees into an "almost empty"
box of comb.
* I am unaccountably sticky again.
Paul
