Bees and hives

Whenever we asked two of your specialist beekeepers to create about getting hives ready for winter months, they both talked about the newsprint means for incorporating hives.
This idea unto is essential, so some tips about what they shared.

From Master Beekeeper Kent:

It might appear cruel to some, but in joining the 2 colonies, the queen from the poor hive should-be killed, then the bad hive put above a sheet of paper above the “good” hive. Naturally, the base board must certanly be removed from the “poor” hive prior to joining utilizing the “good” hive. Never attempt to combine hives utilising the newspaper strategy as soon as the day temperature would be above 90 degrees. The end result are an upper hive-body saturated in prepared bees considering too little air flow.

The maxims for combining hives tend to be:

1. Constantly combine poor with powerful.
   
2. Ensure that the brand new hive features sufficient meals stores – but cannot be honeybound.
   
3. Combining the hives early in the day, rather than later, in the period provides the brand-new hive plenty of time to organize the brood nest and meals shops.
   
4. Attempt to keep consitently the queen productive until frost. If a colony calls for feeding after frost, your best option is always to give making use of a candy board. The candy should be placed entirely on top of, and type a seal above, the group. This may let the condensation from the bees’ respiration to soften the candy, making it accessible for the cluster.
   

From Sean Burgess, Kentucky State Apiarist:

Incorporating poor colonies with powerful colonies

Occasionally you'll have a colony that just won’t excel for just one reason or any other. Perhaps the queen was not correctly mated and she's got a spotty brood pattern. Maybe it is later when you look at the period and a split or a-swarm capture has limited or no sources for build-up. In any event you feel the colony doesn’t stand an acceptable chance for overwintering. It could be reasonable, in my opinion, to mix this colony with a stronger queenright colony which have adequate shops to guide a merge.

Healing a laying worker situation

Whenever a hive goes queenless you operate the risk of building laying employees. For whatever reasons, the bees don’t have actually larvae associated with appropriate age to build up a fresh queen. Occasionally a number of employees will require it upon by themselves to begin laying eggs. This really is evidenced by witnessing just drone brood, (workers is only able to set unfertilized eggs), multiple eggs per cell, and a decline into the population of your bees. You may observe a discontented hum coming from the hive and quite often increased violence. If tips are not taken fully to correct this, the colony is doomed.

Whatever the grounds for merging hives, I recommend the newspaper combine, which has been extremely successful for me personally.

While you are merging a weak colony with a good colony, you have to first get the queen within the weak colony and “dispatch” the girl.

After that i am going to simply take two sheets of black and white paper and slashed them to match securely inside a hive body. Using the magazine toward powerful colony, we place these sheets on the top associated with bunch right in contact with the frames. Using some variety of razor-sharp instrument I will reduce about 7-8 slits about 2" lengthy in paper amongst the top pubs of the structures below, stretching throughout the whole field.

After that i'll take the weak colony (box and structures) and place it over the strong colony and shut it and leave it alone for around three days. Whenever I return back, in almost all instances, i'll discover the paper has been chewed and some removed from the hive. The bees should really be acting generally and getting around the hive easily. Now other paper should really be removed from the hive. According to the season in addition to nectar circulation you may separate this colony later on.