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  • Drone laying colony

  • Beginners forum, ask beekeeping related questions and get help from other experienced beekeepers. Please use the Search Feature please to avoid duplicated threads
Beginners forum, ask beekeeping related questions and get help from other experienced beekeepers. Please use the Search Feature please to avoid duplicated threads
 #11648  by Bobbysbees
 02 Aug 2021, 20:53
just an update.
Got into them today and it was a knacker job. drone laying worker Queen was clipped but I'm guessing she either ended up in the weeds or got stung by another queen that i might of missed before they swarmed.
No great loss though will combine them with my late split as they seem to be down on numbers and it will free up some spare comb and kit for the start of next year.
The QC that was there was chewed out and after shaking them down the a queen excluder there was still no sign of one.
so I guess I will chalk it up as a learning experience.
 #11650  by Steve 1972
 02 Aug 2021, 21:08
Don't combine if you think you have missed a Virgin Queen..you will cause more problems for yourself.. ;)
Scrub Queens can get through the Excluder .
Edited..to add scrub Queens can get through the exclder but usually missed on inspections..and sneak over it..
Safest option is to shake them out a good distance away.
 #11652  by NigelP
 03 Aug 2021, 08:38
Yup, go with the shake they will all find new homes.
Just been reading some of Randy Oliver's research on natural bee movement between hives and apiaries. He attaches small coloured metal discs onto worker bees and then has strong magnets on other hive entrances that rip the tag off. He has found workers in his hives over 5 miles away from the apiary he marked them.....food for thought.
 #11653  by Alfred
 03 Aug 2021, 11:21
Yum.yum indeed
So the two mile forage radius we have ingrained is in dispute?
 #11654  by NigelP
 03 Aug 2021, 12:14
As is "they all return their own hives".
Although the devil in me wonders whether sticking metal discs on their backs might screw up some aspect of their navigation; as bees can definitely sense magnetic fields.

https://www.beeculture.com/a-closer-look-22/

"Honey bees have the ability to detect small fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field. Behavioral studies with worker honey bees have revealed four reproducible effects of magnetic fields on orientation. 1)There are small Missweissungs, or misdirections, in the waggle dance which can be changed by altering external magnetic fields around the comb (Kuterbach and Wolcott 1986a). In their dances, bees convert the angle flown to the food with respect to the sun into an angle danced in respect to gravity. In this conversion, bees make small regular errors which depend largely on the orientation of the dance with respect to the earth’s field. Cancelling the field causes the errors to disappear (Gould et al. 1978). 2)Honey bees will, in the absence of other external cues, build new comb in the same magnetic direction as the parent hive (De Jong 1982). 3)When placed on a horizontal comb, honey bee dancers will gradually over time orient to the four cardinal points of the magnetic compass. 4)Honey bees can set their circadian rhythms to the earth’s geomagnetic fluctuations (Gould 1980). More recently, Walker and Bitterman (1985) have reported that honey bees can be trained to discriminate between magnetic fields of different intensities. Although this behavioral evidence suggests that honey bees can detect weak earth-strength magnetic fields, the sensory system involved in this behavior is not fully understood."
 #11660  by MickBBKA
 06 Aug 2021, 02:36
Alfred wrote:
03 Aug 2021, 11:21
Yum.yum indeed
So the two mile forage radius we have ingrained is in dispute?
There are studies that show honey bees can travel up to 7 1/2 miles foraging. I sometimes take my bees to an area quite far from the heather to produce what I call my ' Moorland Honey ' which is quite a mix but does contain enough heather honey to indicate the bees are travelling quite a distance to forage.