The Maria hive was looking under-workered in comparison to the Swarm hive, AND the Swarm hive was showing signs of swarming, bearding, lots of bees in the hive. So we moved five or six frames of bees and capped brood from Swarm to Maria. While doing that we inserted those bees into a hive body (large) box above the original hive body, and a honey super added recently. So we have a bunch of strange bees going into the middle of the Maria hive. Standard practice is to use newspaper to separate the different origin bees from the others until they get used to the new queen smell. This keeps them from fighting the original occupants. We did this on a Monday. On Saturday, the pictures below show how much newspaper the had removed -- 3 layers above, 3 layers below!
 |
| Top layer between queen excluder and top hive body. |
 |
| Top layer from the bottom of the super and queen excluder grill. |
You can see there are a lot fewer bees in the honey super than in the hive bodies below. Addition of the new bees and removal of the newspaper appear to have kept them pretty busy.
 |
| Above the original hive body with the queen. |
I did rip out the remaining paper to save the bees the trouble.
No comments:
Post a Comment