what to do with weak hives

Hello Thomas. I'll call you next week.

Adding frames of brood in the spring can sometimes not really help as much as you think. What happens is that you now expanded the area of brood the weak hives need to keep warm, especially at night.

What I like to do is swap a weak hive location with a strong hive location mid-day while bees are flying. This will boost the weak hive's numbers and allows them to warm, raise, and get over the hump. There is no fighting as the bees coming back to the weak hive, now at the former strong hive's location are loaded with pollen and nectar and exhibit no aggressive motives.

The strong hives only takes a temporary setback in field force bees and usually within ten days, they are back to the same production levels.

I use hive swapping many times in nuc building. I just simply can not move frames around sometimes as the logistics of bees, brood, never seem to work out. But swapping the nuc locations is simple, fast, and effective.

Hi Guy's
To my mind moving frames from one hive to another is a no-no. There is one exception and that is if you suspect a colony might be queenless for what ever reason then a frame of eggs and larvea can be taken from one hive to another to test and see if the colony build queen cells.
I do not move frames because they could contain disease that has passed on its infection to the original hive and now moving it into a clean hive we are creating problems for ourselves.

Regards;

Thanks guys i checked on them today to see how things are going and boy they are really starting to build up.I found a young virgin queen today in the last hive and she is so beautiful and brown she is carni i also checked on my others and they are working like strong hives i am hoping the weather breaks soon but so far they are doing well i guess they are waiting like myself for better weather. I looked in my old hive and i see that i do have to take out some frames of nothing but honey to open up the brood nestthey are growing but she really does not have the space to really let loose on laying. And my other big hive has brrod in the super and brood chamber so i am looking to maybe use this one to make my honey off but i am going to split them soon.

Thomas

Swaping frames;

I don't think you are going to infect a new hive with a new disease by Swaping frames from the same yard.

I understand drones are constant visitors among different hives,
also field bees returning with pollen are uncontested by guard bees during a heavy flow, then their is just plain ole drifting among the hives.

Course now I have been wrong before !

PCM

Yes I do see your point regarding moving frames within the same yard, because you know if any colonies are suffering with disease, that's to say disease that shows its self.

Do you know if the house bees are giving the virgin queen a hard time?
The workers know wether the queen has been mated and if she hasn't then they will begin to push and shove her and bit her legs.

There's so much we have got to learn from these magnificant tiny insects.

Regards;

Bcrazy the bees are tending to her and she is small i think she came out a day ago but she was walking around eating and the workers were going about thier business. I also was out today when i heard the young queen from the hive that swarmed pipping i could hear her from the other end of the yard so i guess she is out and ready to fight any other queen that is there but i am hoping the weather breaks here i am seeing lots of dandilions blooming in the yard more then i have ever seen in years but they are calling for rain the next two days here.


Thomas

thomas said:

i heard the young queen from the hive that swarmed pipping i could hear her from the other end of the yard


Thomas

Click to expand...

Could you please tell me more about "pipping" ...not sure I know about this?

Hello

You asked about pipping it's a noise that is made by a young queen ready to fight another young queen in the hive. I also never heard of this until i bought a young queen and she started making this noise and i asked and they told me she was chalenging another queen to fight thats what i was told if you have young queens you will hear them.

Thomas

Hello Thomas,
I'm not an expert on piping, but I think you can get the sound by other things other than fighting. Queens under stress, being confined, etc. Certainly they will pipe if you have multiple queens as when you have several queen cells opening up at the same time, so it is associated with challenges as you said. But I do not think it's the only thing that causes piping.

Re:

BjornBee said:

Hello Thomas,
I'm not an expert on piping, but I think you can get the sound by other things other than fighting. Queens under stress, being confined, etc.

Click to expand...

Just this past Monday at our local club meeting one of the guys who runs about 200 colonies was telling a funny story about his local post office. He said they had sort of gotten used to him getting bees in the mail, but when he ordered batch of queens and they were all piping at each other the postal folks freaked.

Now thats funny i guess if people are not use to hearing it would be freaked out.

Thomas

Re: Re:

indypartridge said:

BjornBee said:

Hello Thomas,
I'm not an expert on piping, but I think you can get the sound by other things other than fighting. Queens under stress, being confined, etc.

Click to expand...

Just this past Monday at our local club meeting one of the guys who runs about 200 colonies was telling a funny story about his local post office. He said they had sort of gotten used to him getting bees in the mail, but when he ordered batch of queens and they were all piping at each other the postal folks freaked.

Click to expand...

That is a triple play....

Bees stressed out, confined, and challenging each other to fight..