Lost Queen
PostPosted:08 Aug 2022, 17:55
On Saturday I was at my out apiary and noticed a few bees on one side of a hive. Lo and behold a young queen was there with a cup-full of attendants.
I marked her pink (wing as well as thorax!) for easy identification and she flew back to the side of the hive. It does look like a small mating swarm that perhaps got lost whilst I was stomping around the apiary?
Anyway, my guess was that she would fly off into the distance so with nothing to lose, I caged her and popped her into a mini-nuc and swept the bees in with her and left it by the big hive. Would they stay with her?
No.
The next day she was surrounded by only a few attendants so she has gone into a mini-nuc from which the queen had been taken from a few days earlier. With queen excluder over the entrance, I'll leave her in there for a couple of days and then let her fly. With luck she will come back.
Now the task is to find where she came from.
I marked her pink (wing as well as thorax!) for easy identification and she flew back to the side of the hive. It does look like a small mating swarm that perhaps got lost whilst I was stomping around the apiary?
Anyway, my guess was that she would fly off into the distance so with nothing to lose, I caged her and popped her into a mini-nuc and swept the bees in with her and left it by the big hive. Would they stay with her?
No.
The next day she was surrounded by only a few attendants so she has gone into a mini-nuc from which the queen had been taken from a few days earlier. With queen excluder over the entrance, I'll leave her in there for a couple of days and then let her fly. With luck she will come back.
Now the task is to find where she came from.