oloriel | Back into the bees

I resisted the urge to check on the fledgling colony... until today. (My excuse was that after one week, I would be able to see whether they were trying to breed a new queen; and if they weren't, I still had time to give them some new brood from the donor colony.)

There are several ways of getting additional colonies, and the cheapest way (if you've got at least one healthy colony already) is to make them yourself. This also has the advantage of making more room in the strong colony, so their urge to swarm is reduced. Preventing swarming is a game you have to play until midsummer. Bees very rarely swarm after late June, but up until then, you always have to take care that they don't feel too crowded in their box because otherwise, they'll be off and away. Mind you, sometimes they swarm even though they've got plenty of room. And sometimes they swarm as late as August - my main colony originally was an August swarm...
(In the olden days, before moveable frames, you wanted swarms in order to get more hives, and also in order to take the honey without having to contend with a whole colony of bees. These days, you're trying to prevent swarms and set up new colonies at your own leisure.) You either take one or two frames of brood (and workers) out of the strong colony, put it into a new box along with some empty or honey frames, and take that box at least three kms away from where the original colony is located (worker bees have a range of about 2,5 km, and if you leave them within that range, they'll always return to their old colony). After three weeks, you can take that box back to your garden or wherever you normally want to keep your bees. Alternatively, you remove the donor colony from its old spot - just a little will do, I just pushed mine to the other side of its pallet - and put the new box in the old spot; then, again, you put in one or two frames of brood into this new box along with some empty or honey frames. Now, the workers from the old colony will continue to fly out and gather nectar and pollen, but instead of returning to their old hive, which is now in a slightly different location, they'll fly into the new box.

I took the latter approach because it seemed more simple (and also I had neither the time nor inclination to drive a box of bees around).
Either way - in theory - the workers will notice that suddenly, there is no more queen; and because they have young brood, their emergency program kicks in. The magic about bees is that any female larva that's younger than four days can be turned into a queen if the workers continue to give it royal jelly instead of switching to plain pollen. That's why you just give a fledgling hive some young brood instead of paying (a lot of!) money for a new queen - under the right conditions (right time of the year, sufficient brood and pollen, healthy workers), the bees will take care of that by themselves.

Now, the brood frame I put into my Flugling (that's what German beekeepers call a fledgling hive that's "recruiting" its workers by standing in the old colony's spot) had both larvae in different stages of development and eggs on it, so I was pretty certain that the bees would be able to raise at least one new queen. (They generally raise several, as back-up in case one new queen doesn't return from her mating flight. Normally, a newly-hatched queen will immediately try to kill all the competition, but very often the workers hide the other hatched queen cells until the first new queen has mated. After that... carnage.) But you never know - last year, the colony didn't behave according to the book, either!

When I opened the box, there were a lot of bees, so the trick of drawing workers from the donor colony into new box had obviously worked.

(I pushed the frames apart in order to be able to look in. Normally, there wouldn't be so much room because the frames are directly adjacent, with just enough room for the bees to crawl past each other.)
So that was good! The two days after I had started the new colony were very rainy, so I was a bit uncertain whether the Flugling principle would work as it should. But it clearly did.

Better yet: I saw five queen cells - three in the making, two already capped - so that was nothing to worry about, either!

Spot the three queen cells in this pic! Hint: They're the cone-like structures on the comb. (Queens grow larger than workers, so they need larger cells, too. The smaller bumps to the left are drone cells - drones are also slightly larger than workers.) The one on the right-hand side is already capped. You don't want to find a capped queen cell in your ordinary colonies, because that either means they've already swarmed or they just haven't swarmed yet because of the weather so you were luckier than you deserve. But in a fledgling hive, this is exactly what you need.

When this process works - as it does in my fledgling Flugling so far - you'll have a queen-right, fully functional nuke about three weeks after setting it up. At that point, one new queen will have mated and made it back into the colony, and can then begin to lay eggs. (That's also a good time to treat the new colony with lactic acid in order to kill any varroa mites you may have brought in from the old colony. Lactic acid doesn't reach capped brood - which is where the mites procreate - but is otherwise both reliable and mild on the bees, so using it when there is no capped brood is recommended.) And that's that!

Now, of course, I'd like to be able to turn the clock ahead two weeks in order to see whether they continue to do this well. But alas, I'll have to let time run its normal course. I also hope that in a week or two, I'll be able to repeat this process from the same donor colony. And then I hope that my two or three colonies will continue to thrive so that I can try to hibernate them all individually. But let's not think of winter now! It's (almost) summer!

Here, have three random pictures of my ladies at work, just because!

The donor colony is doing all right, too. They still haven't started on the drone frame - they were clearly busy enough replacing the normal brood frame I stole from them last week ;) - but they're continuing to use the honey super, which I appreciate...

So, still (even more) optimistic! :D