cweaton
New Bee
- Joined
- May 19, 2011
- Messages
- 14
- Reaction score
- 0
- Location
- Glossop
- Hive Type
- National
- Number of Hives
- 4
Hi, I've (jointly) taken over a hive in a slightly complicated situation, and wouldn't mind another viewpoint on how to go about a whole string of operations please.
Here's the situtation:
At the moment we have one very strong colony of placid bees in a double brood box, with evenly distributed stores and brood. One super, but good stores in brood boxes. The queen is marked and quite large. However:
(a) it has to be moved asap, to a location very close by (less than 0.5 miles)
(b) it has a very high varroa count, which needs seeing to - I'd like to do a shook swarm
(c) we want/need to split the colony.
(d) because of the bad weather we've not been able to do a full inspection for a while, so there are probably queen cells - let's assume there are. We'll inspect when we come to move the hive.
I'm guessing the best thing is to keep things simple and do one thing at a time (move, split, shook swarm), but this seems like three lots of disruption for the bees. It would also be very heavy to lift!
However, there might be advantages in combining some proceedures. For example, here's a complex plan:
(i) separate the brood boxes at old site onto two floors etc. and sort through, swapping frames so that we have queen in one and queen cells in the other.
(ii) come back in the evening and move the two boxes onto the new site, doing a shook swarm straight away on the one with the queen in. (And a shook swarm on the other once the queen is mated and laying).
Any opinions?
Here's the situtation:
At the moment we have one very strong colony of placid bees in a double brood box, with evenly distributed stores and brood. One super, but good stores in brood boxes. The queen is marked and quite large. However:
(a) it has to be moved asap, to a location very close by (less than 0.5 miles)
(b) it has a very high varroa count, which needs seeing to - I'd like to do a shook swarm
(c) we want/need to split the colony.
(d) because of the bad weather we've not been able to do a full inspection for a while, so there are probably queen cells - let's assume there are. We'll inspect when we come to move the hive.
I'm guessing the best thing is to keep things simple and do one thing at a time (move, split, shook swarm), but this seems like three lots of disruption for the bees. It would also be very heavy to lift!
However, there might be advantages in combining some proceedures. For example, here's a complex plan:
(i) separate the brood boxes at old site onto two floors etc. and sort through, swapping frames so that we have queen in one and queen cells in the other.
(ii) come back in the evening and move the two boxes onto the new site, doing a shook swarm straight away on the one with the queen in. (And a shook swarm on the other once the queen is mated and laying).
Any opinions?