Making New Hives

Posted on Wednesday 31 May 2006 at 12:03

Dave made 15 new hives over the last couple of days. He started yesterday morning, placing frames of bees from our stronger hives into separate boxes above the brood chambers. He used excluders (a wire frame with spaces that a mated queen can't fit through but worker bees can) to get a box of bees separate without the existing queen. To attract the bees upward, he placed brood (baby bees) up above the excluder for the bees to take care of. this is important to starting a strong new hive as well, since they'd otherwise have to wait for the new queen's eggs to mature and hatch before the hive would start growing.

Yesterday evening, after heading down to the tiny ghost town of Treesbank to pick up our new queens from a noted breeder, he moved the boxes of bees off the hives and left them to get lonely for a leader. This morning, he installed the new queens.

This is a queen cage. the queens don't go out flying around except to mate or swarm, so catching them isn't too hard for the breeder. He gives them to us in a ventilated plastic box that can hold several of these, along with nurse bees (workers) surrounding the cages to keep the queens happy. We kill off those workers once we get home to prevent any chance of accidental disease or parasite transfer. Bees are not housepets, and they can catch things unawares, though we trust the breeder to keep clean hives.

The long, narrow part at the bottom holds "queen candy," which plugs the escape route. The queen and the bees eat away at this over the course of a few days, until she can crawl out. This keeps her caged until the bees have adjusted to her particular scent. She is safe and won't be killed by them as an intruder. By the time she's out, they should have accepted her as their new leader!

Dave places the queen cages in the hives, sandwiching them in the middle between frames. They stick in the wax a bit, and the frames also keep them braced at the top of the hive. If they fall down, he has to pull a few frames and reposition them. Below is a correctly placed queen cage. The long, narrow neck with the queen candy points down.

The bees in this hive were all over the queen cage instantly. Dave pulled the queen cage and had a look at their behaviour, but they didn't seem to be trying to sting the queen. All the same, he pulled out the frames and looked them over to check for queen cells (the bees trying to raise their own queen - this would make them aggressive toward the new one we were putting in).

He didn't find any queen cells, so he replaced everything. In all this, he only got one sting, and it was kind of because he had his face right up to a frame and was blowing the bees off it. He says these are the gentlest bees he's ever had.

Untitled Comment

Posted by Carol on Thursday 1 June 2006 at 11:00 - Link

Wow, this is really interesting. I'm going to show it to my kids tomorrow. They've always wanted to know about beehives.
~Carol

Hello! Thanks for Stopping by!!!!

Posted by alaskagirl on Thursday 1 June 2006 at 11:48 - Link

Thanks for leaving a comment. My mom is not having attacks anymore, thank God! She has been doing great. If you want to contact her still her blog is

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I don't really like bees. They scare me a lot. I don't think I will EVER be able to raise them. :)

Alycia