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Year one (do-over)
Apr. 19th, 2010 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doodlemaierBees are hived at both addresses now, tentatively, at least. In both packages I managed to pull the cork out of the wrong end of the queen cage. With the Russians I was able to get it back into place before Her Majesty seized upon the opportunity of my foible to escape. Not so lucky/skillful/fortunate with the Italians in Annandale this weekend. I ended up just releasing the queen into the general population, albeit most of them were still in the shipping crate in the bottom-most super when I let her out.
In hiving packaged honeybees there always exists the danger that workers will reject their queen, showing their disapproval by collectively forming a tight ball around her until she suffocates. Queens are shipped in the same package as the other bees but are sequestered into a small box separated from the rest by a screen mesh so that her attendants can provide food. A candy plug is placed into one of two openings in the queen cage for the bees to gradually eat their way through releasing the queen and, effectively, widening the margin of time and exposure to her pheromones that unify workers of disparate colonies that are packaged together and shipped by commercial apiaries as a "swarm". I only wish that the standard was to put the candy plug at the opposite end of the queen's cage from the little disk that secures the cage to the top of the crate in transit. It seems backward to not allow the efficient beekeeper the opportunity to capitalize on the usefulness of that hanger when it's already there, serving the precise same k I'm fairly confident that she's fine, but I won't be able to confirm this for a few days yet - Schroedinger's Queen Bee.
It sucks to have to learn stuff like this at the end of a stick (failure) but it's evidence that I'm growing and still learning.
In hiving packaged honeybees there always exists the danger that workers will reject their queen, showing their disapproval by collectively forming a tight ball around her until she suffocates. Queens are shipped in the same package as the other bees but are sequestered into a small box separated from the rest by a screen mesh so that her attendants can provide food. A candy plug is placed into one of two openings in the queen cage for the bees to gradually eat their way through releasing the queen and, effectively, widening the margin of time and exposure to her pheromones that unify workers of disparate colonies that are packaged together and shipped by commercial apiaries as a "swarm". I only wish that the standard was to put the candy plug at the opposite end of the queen's cage from the little disk that secures the cage to the top of the crate in transit. It seems backward to not allow the efficient beekeeper the opportunity to capitalize on the usefulness of that hanger when it's already there, serving the precise same k I'm fairly confident that she's fine, but I won't be able to confirm this for a few days yet - Schroedinger's Queen Bee.
It sucks to have to learn stuff like this at the end of a stick (failure) but it's evidence that I'm growing and still learning.
