Natural Beekeeping International Forum

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Just the quickest of posts. As some of you may may know, I'm now running multi-queen hives in which increase can be made without any need to make splits; which eliminate the need to have mating nucs; and - if you check out the photographs below - also eliminates any need for the artificial queen-rearing which only becomes necessary when small queenless colonies are formed.

The sequence starts by making (what I call) 'mini-combs' and placing these into a nuc box which contains a selected breeder queen.



The worker bees there first fasten the 'mini-comb' more securely and then begin drawing it out.
As soon as the first eggs have hatched, the frame is then transfered to one queenless section of an otherwise queenright multi-queen hive, where the bees begin to draw emergency cells. Exactly twenty-four hours later that section reverts to a queenright condition when the developing queen larvae continue to be fed within the nutritional environment of a full-sized colony, thusly:





I've just set-up a five-queen hive and had intended for each colony to create and raise it's own supercedure cell(s) - but there are obviously enough q/cells in the above photograph to skip that step, and so now I'll just cut 'em out and donate them.

More info at: http://heretics-guide.atwebpages.com/trip2017_01.htm

Colin
BBC
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Bees build Brace Comb for a reason, not just to be bloody-minded.