Using Mated queens

Here is an image from the circle split, which was the topic of last weeks post.  The update this week on this is that most of the nucs where fairly evenly split and we only swapped two of the nucs in position so that the flying bees would strengthen the weaker nuc.

As well as doing a lot of general bee work and discovering that there are happily laying queens in a couple of hives that had been in shut down. The main interesting job this week was the caging and using of the mated queens from our queen rearing. It was quite hard to find the queens and capture them into queen cages, we used butler cages.... the baby nucs where then re-populated with any sealed queen cells we could find around the other hives, primarily hive 10 which was split last week so they were going to be knocked down if we did not use them.

Two mated queens were sold the other two have been introduced into the hives in the apiary.  There are lots of methods of introducing queens and we used a slightly different approach in each hive. In hive 20; where the queen cell we left three weeks ago had failed to hatch, we put FOUR layers of newspaper over the end of the cage and left the bees alone until next week.  The other hive 13 the queen was introduced with the wooden block still in and then on Sunday, TWO layers of newspaper was to be put over instead of the block.  To insert the cage in, use a cocktail stick and insert into the side of a frame, preferable near the center of the hive.

One useful tip I learned if you are using a queen cage, is to make sure there is an area in the cage where the queen can shelter, just encase any of the bees decided to try and bite her legs off, this is easily achieved by wrapper a piece of tape around the cage.