Introducing a Carniolan Queen (to an Italian Hive)
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- čas přidán 5. 09. 2024
- This is Part 2 of a series...
PART 1: • Remember all those swa...
PART 3: • New Queen Rejected? An...
PART 4: • Profoundly Bummed - Be...
PART 5: • Just Wait... A Beekeep...
I introduced a Carniolian queen into my Italian hive today. This queen was bred one town over from me, so she comes from an over-wintered colony. (This is good!) It was suggested to introduce her slowly because it is not entirely certain that the existing hive was queenless. I believe it is, but there is a chance there was a virgin or newly-mated queen in there that I missed.
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A carniolan ...nice ....but you better stock up on Nucs for next year :) Carniolans are quite swarmy compared to most other bees, when there is a flow on the queen can blast the eggs out (which will be very good for your winter bee situation), but obviously if she lays everywhere they can get honey bound quite quickly, so you will need to be on top of the "super" situation especially in spring if the weather is good. The bees calmed down very quickly I thought, may have been some biting but definitely no attempts at stinging - the butts were up not down. You can take your hive tool or finger and run it over the face of the mesh to see how determined and "fixated" they are with her. If they stick like velcro and are reluctant to be moved that is a bad sign. Fanning is a good sign, and little wing "flicks". However there are an awful lot of bee's in that hive and obviously not all of the bees may feel the same way especially foragers and guard bees. I know there is a time lag, so what has happened has already happened, but faced with the same situation you should make sure that the candy cork is NOT removed, less than 24 hours to release is not good in most situations. I would have left the cork in and left her for a couple of days, then checked the demeanor of the hive and removed the cork for them to release her. Some things to watch for when you check a couple of days later is a) the queen is still alive b) they are not ignoring her but you can move them out of the way fairly easily c) they are not trying to propolise the wire mesh. If it all looks good then the cork comes out. The bees that are tending to the new queen pass her pheromones around to other bees in the hive so the more time they have to do this the better. There are two ways to introduce her that are better (in my opinion) when the hive is as big as this one - 1) set her up in a nuc with capped brood and stores and an empty drawn comb, she will be accepted quickly and emerging bees are 100% loyal to her as they know no other queen. Then a week later install the frames of that Nuc into the hive - you can use a 1:1 sugar water spray with a drop of essential oil eg lemon grass to spray down between the frames in the hive to mask the change of pheromones. But basically she is surrounded by bees that are loyal to her by that time and she will have started laying - that is always a big winning situation to the bees for acceptance. 2) Introduce her in a large push in cage (you can make one with some no 8 mesh) and place the cage in an area with emerging brood and a few cells of honey. Again about 4 days is required, but again she gets to lay eggs as soon as possible. This would have been my preferred method. It also gives you another 4 days to triple check for a small patch of eggs /resident queen. It is exciting stuff ...and great video as per usual :)
DreamofaHive Your comments are awesome! I wish I had read this before the introduction. The breeder that sold her to me actually chatted with me for about 45 minutes about releasing her but gave NO mention of a cork or delaying her release. What you wrote makes perfect sense. I pinned your comment for all future beekeepers watching this and reading the comments! Thanks.
Currently binge watching bee hive videos. Yup. This is actually very interesting though!!
such a cliffhanger Gah.. its worse than waiting for the next series of GoT!
Stephen Redford Sorry... it took me a weekend to shoot this and a week to edit. I get to stretch it out a little! Part 3 will be up Sunday. Thanks for watching!
loving this ongoing hive mystery...
Matt K Then you'll really love parts 4 and 5. Stay tuned.
As a photographer, I'm impressed by how close you were able to get with your macro.
John Abbott Ha ha. Not a macro. It's a Panasonic 12-60 with my camera just sitting on the inner cover. Check out my Instagram for a behind the scenes image of the shot. On my micro 4/3 camera, the 12-60 acts like a 24-120. I was impressed with the footage, too. And I don't do anything to it. That's straight out of the camera, full auto mode!
i did the same thing you did, i introduced a carniolan queen over laborday weekend let them eat the candy and after 5 days the cage was empty, i never found the marked queen. Today i looked in that hive and found an unmarked italian queen. i experienced everything you did across the past 3 weeks and never thought it would go this way. kinda wasted 30 bux on a queen though..
great videos by the way
Interesting way to introduce a cage. Since you were concerned about the lid not closing, one thing you could have done was take one of the empty boxes sitting on the ground right next to the hive and placed it over the inner cover, like you do for feeders. But, given the colder nights we are having now, it was probably better to place the cage in the hole of the inner cover to help keep her warm.
FWIW, I keep an empty super over the inner cover of all my hives year-round. In the summer it provides some extra space for bees to move into, if the colony is large and the weather is hot - helps prevent bearding on the outside of the hive. In the winter it provides a place for insulation. In the spring and fall it provides a place to put a top feeder. You’d be amazed how many bees move up in there, when it’s really hot. And, I’ve never had a colony build comb in the empty space (unlike with the Imirie shims I use in the winter for top entrances, if I don't take them off early enough in the spring). Probably just jinxed myself.
Good luck.
I wouldn't mind if you made more videos that just showed off the lil ladies working like this one
Haha Love the cliffhanger "uh-oh!"
Jim I expect this has been suggested already, but have you got a shim rather than those blocks to raise the lid up a little.
We made 2 one for each of our red cedar hives.
You need a length of 2x1 pine,cut it to the size of the box and screw together with the 2 inch side facing upwards.
Then in the centre of each length drill a hole large enough for 2-3 bees to enter through.
Then on the inside cover each hole with fine wire hard cloth.
Then once made place it on the top of the hive under the inner cover or above it in this case as the queens in the cage.
Then just replace the roof.
It will ventilate the hive perfectly allowing the moisture to escape as it hits the inner cover/ crown board.
It's also a great way to aid in what your doing if this problem happens again a 2 in 1 spacer hive vent.
Shaun Barker Great tip. I can make some of those pretty easily. Thanks!
They don't seem at all aggressive towards her. The 3 part video really adds to the suspense and drama ! It reminds me of the 3 part Brady Bunch episodes at the Grand Canyon and Hawaii...I just hope she doesn't get hit in the head with a surfboard like Greg did lol..... I can't wait for the conclusion !!
Baltimore_Dave Ha ha ha ha ha. Brady Bunch cliffhangers! My childhood!
Good luck i hope this queen works out. I enjoy your videos.
Thank you
The ending is like a soap opera keeping us hanging lol,the uh oh at the end has us hanging.
yeah Jim, i can never tell if they are being aggressive or not when introducing a new queen. to me it looked like they were biting the cage to get at the queen instead of just feeding her. but not in an overly aggressive way like i have seen on some videos just like you said. but i lost 4 queens this spring myself... mainly due to multiple mistakes i made. later this year i managed to successfully hive 3 out of 4 queens in nucs. but i was trying to start new nucs, not get an existing hive queen right. i've had more luck creating my own queens than introducing purchased queens, but i'm still learning after 5 years :)
one thing that has become clear to me based on my own experience and some detail i have picked up online. i think most ppl give the queen too much credit. i believe the hive makes most if not all decisions. they decide to make supersedure and smarms cells. and i believe they also destroy queen cells. if you think about it logically, having two queens fight it out would put the whole hive at risk. but f the workers choose and kill unhatched secondary queens or ball one of the queens themselves, then they are more assured that the remaining queen will not be injured in a brawl.
now i believe it is possible one queen will seek and destroy her sisters, but when the hive wants to swarm, i've read that the workers will defend and protect the other queen cells and encourage the first hatched queen to swarm. this also makes sense to me. the hatched queen has no idea if the hive was planning a supersedure or planning to swarm. in the end, i'm now convinced the queen serves at the leisure and direction of the hive and not the other way around. that's why introducing a new queen is so tricky. the hive has to decide.
p.s. 1 week ago i inspected one of my nucs and found a newly emerged queen cell, so i set off to go find the new virgin queen. i found her 4 frames in, but to my surprise i also found the old queen on the same side of the same frame within inches of each other with no apparent hostility between them. i did not want to take chances so i removed the old queen and immediately placed her in a nextdoor nuc which had an extra queen that i was not happy with. i killed her and introduced this old queen immediately. i was aware that a laying queen could be introduced immediately with success because she is giving off the right pheromones whereas a queen that has been caged overnight has already stopped. and yesterday, one week later, i found her in the hive doing her thing! i expect they will replace her once they realize she is fading, but i'm hoping to get just one more daughter from her before the season is done down here.
Thanks for the information. I am still learning and the behavior on the video is a bit confusing to me. It did not look like a vibrating ball of bees. But I also couldn't really tell if they were feeding her. I don't want to spoil tomorrow's video, but it turns out to be a strange introduction. I'm actually a week ahead of you guys. This video was recorded LAST Saturday and I've left the new queen alone in the hive for 6 days. I'm heading up there this afternoon to see what's up. I will finally get the answer to whether or not there was a death match with a returning queen or a virgin that I missed. Stay tuned. Thanks again for the comment!
I dont normally care about bees except as a concerned human. But the drama with your 3 hives is 10 times more appealing and more interesting than anything on th
Lol the cliffhanger suspense is real. It had better not be like one of those gosh darn reality show cliffhangers where they're like *GLASS SHATTERING* "OH MY GOD!" *CAMERA JOSTELING* Then u come back from commercial break and they knocked a cup off the table by accident or something stupid.....I have faith in you that you're better than that :)
Lucrative When I was editing this, I was trying to squish three days of beekeeping into one video and it was 25 minutes long. So I decided to break it up day by day as I experienced it. It makes more sense and, yes, adding a little suspense doesn't hurt. You can trust me. Stay tuned!
I love all your videos and think they are really great and very high quality entertainment. I'm just busting your balls and trying to be funny. I wont be mad at you even if you did the false cliffhanger thing. The TV people do it for a reason.....it's 9:30 am the day after and I'm on CZcams looking for the new video, lol. Good luck with the new queen :)
noooo u cant say uh oh at the end and leave us hanging!!!!!
Totally amazed..bees are freekin awsome
Nice Tease!!
Great!
You monster! how could you end it like that!?! cant wait to see whats next.
TimTheScarecrow Tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion... and spoiler alert... I just filmed an epilogue today which will be up early next week!
Noooooo....Cliffhanger in a CZcams video....lol. Great stuff Vino. I love your content. This is my first year. I am really learning and at times I get to test my own knowledge as I think of how I would do it, and then I get to see if I was right or not. Absolutely love it love it. Thank you for letting us follow along on your journey.
I am going through this exact same thing this week. I will see queen status tomorrow.
virgin queens are very hard to spot. they dont have the booty that a laying queen has. i think i have only seen one virgin queen before, and that was one that was just hatching when we opened the hive. we watched her hatch, then stole ALL other queen cells and popped them into a couple queenless hives in the same yard. sometimes it works ^_^
If a queen killed the other cells, the would have been entered through the sides. If the emerged through the ends, then they are out mating. I would not introduce a new mated queen for another week or ten days. Once the mated queen returns, it takes another few days for her to get going laying eggs. Patience!
that was an amazing shot! loved seeing the process, btw was she a marked queen? If not how do you feel about marking her? helps me slot to find my queens fast
Aka Jolly Yes, she is marked yellow.
I know it's been years since this happened, but I wanted to ask about what I noticed. None of the bees were fanning around the queen to spread her pheromones. While they aren't aggressive toward her, could the lack of fanning be a sign of rejection of the queen?
OMG... The suspense is just to much. I have the bell on your notification on but I didn't see any videos seen yesterday. But I'm still hopeful for a Balboa Queen the genie can't die and for the last clip sounds like something went wrong.
Do you know of a website I can go to and see what kind of bees that I have. Cuz one box I have the bees are yellow with black stripes the other one is mostly black on the tail
OK - I'm gonna stick my two cents in here. First off, I am not an active beekeeper, nor have I been one in the past. I'm simply following your video blog (along with others), and I think there's trouble on the horizon.
Specifically, I think your attempt to re-queen the Italians is going to fail. Oh, not because of another queen, but rather that you are attempting to do it too quickly. When other beekeepers have gone through this process, the queen cage has a cork cover protecting the candy plug. They introduce the cage, and wait 48 hours (or so) to allow the workers to acclimate to the new queen and her pheromones before removing the cork and allowing the workers access to the candy fondant. The Italians have not had that settling-in time, and I think they are going to kill her.
The k young have been searching for this question for days
Note to self: Invest in a sheet of glass that can be put on the hive for observation.
How was the comparison between the Carnis and Italian hives?
That year, the Carniolans didn't make it. Then I got another one and last year the Carniolan was the biggest, most productive hive I've ever had. I'll be getting more in the future.
Carneys x with Italians good for 3 years then they can get a bit aggressive iv got 1 hive like this and they are bad i always check last today I went to the place I keep them and checked the other hives first low smoke and no stings then I opened these guys up and they were bouncing of me had a vail and gloves on they got under my sweater and 13 stings to the belly thats what my wife pulled out when I got home and 1 to the leg .my tutor says this is common with this x so rember this ps 1 hive for sale a bit aggressive
Dude - are those Apivar strips you took off the top of your inner cover with your bare hands?
J. David Weidner No, those were pieces of corrugated plastic to prop up the cover for ventilation.
Suspense!!! ;P
If you can easily brush bees off cage they like her
Beautiful hive.
I'm curious what you think about bee genetics? Are there still pure carniolan and italian strains anymore? Or is everything sort of muddied?
Your videos are a lot of fun.
Yeah, everything gets muddled after one generation. Which is fine, actually. After 5 seasons, I've started to develop my own local strain of survivors.
how else do queen bees mate besides open flights
jak smith As far as I know, they go on mating flights to drone congregation areas and will mate with multiple drones.
Yo, what did you do with the extra queen?
How how is the temperament of that species of bees
They were great for two years and then swarmed late one fall and didn’t survive the winter.
Why in the world you requiem when there are open swarm cells. If there is not a virgin queen in the hive she could be on a mating flight.
I predict this will fail. Because your not really sure the hive is queenless, you had to test it with a frame of eggs from another hive. If there is another queen the queen won't kill the Carniolian queen but the workers will do it (if a queen is going to mate and flies in the hive right next to it, and there is a queen she is dead before entering the hive). And it is almost impossible to add a mated queen in a hive from a different specie, there are a few methods to do it. It can work wit an virgin queen but if she is mated you need to check every 7 days if she will superseded her.
The breeder didn't think introducing a mated Carniolan into an Italian hive would be a problem. He was a little concerned that there may be a queen in there, but not about it being a different species. I am aware of the risk of there being another queen and I said that a few times. I just feel that at this time of the season, in my neighborhood, the likelihood of one of those swarm queens successfully mating is pretty low. It is a gamble, but if it works, I'll be glad I did it now, rather than 2-3 weeks from now. This hive needs brood. Winter weather is just about 5-6 weeks away.
What do you mean uh oh?🤔
Will the new Queen make it Has the old queen laying in hiding find out not time on Dragon Ball Z oops Vino Farms
Jim, for future reference, I believe one of the ways you can see if they seem to be accepting the Queen is to look at the Queen herself. She seems to be on the screen, receiving care from the bees. If this were true, it would indicate the queen thinks they are accepting her, and their behavior seems to be accepting. If they were NOT accepting, her being on the screen would invite them to try to hurt her. That did not seem to be happening. I know the outcome but at this point in the video (8:14 +) I would have felt they were eagerly accepting. Of course, I am not a bee, or a beekeeper, so what the heck do I know anyway? LOL.
I think DreamofaHive had the definitive answer on this one.
Cork the end! You need to delay this release!
Yes, I know I should have done this... now. The supplier said nothing about delaying her release so it didn't cross my mind.
HRM the queen got sacked ?
Well, it's pretty obvious A queen got sacked. The bees were around something, it seems. The question is, which queen is it? What killed it? And is there a queen currently in the hive? ... OK, three questions. I'm biting my toenails because the nails on my fingers are down to the quick.
How much do you pay for a queen?
This one was $30.
Sound not good in the last of video , Can't wait for next video T_T
I said on the video that I had forgotten my microphone. Sorry about that. The rest of the videos are OK.
Thank god! I was scared !
Try to brush them off!
All (Domesticated) Bee's need to have a good Master. Just like a Dog or Cat :-)
Utoh
what the hell
No it's the opposite. If they attack her they have a queen