Bee Buzz
KONA QUEENS
It never fails. Our
new queens arrived from Kona on a beautiful, warm April morning.
The forecast called for a temperature drop of about 25 degrees
and an upslope condition. In the Colorado front range, that means
snow, lot’s of it. And so the scramble was on. There wasn’t
sufficient time to get the new queens installed in their new homes,
so the name of the game is making them comfortable for several
days. This is done by building a queen bank – and if done
correctly it’s like a few days at the Ritz for the queens.
You’ve probably heard that there can be only one queen per
hive, but in fact there is a way to have several (caged) queens
in a single hive. The secret is to populate a hive with young
nurse bees and be absolutely sure that no queen exists. Then place
the caged queens in the hive and the nurse bees will tend all
the queens – feeding them through the screened covers on
their cages. After that long trip from Kona, the new queens are
well served by a few days of R & R prior to heading up new
colonies and laying 1200 to 2000 eggs a day! Oh, by the way, the
forecast was accurate – it snowed all night and most of
the next day. Two days later it was warm and beautiful. I peeked
into the queen bank and found lots of bees attending the queens
so all looked well and I began the process of preparing their
new homes...
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