Hello Steemers. Good to have you with us again..
The past two day have been fantastic!
Yesterday we caught 51 queens for sale to Manitoba. The girls were a bit strange. The weather was hot but overcast. Queens and bees were runny. Lots of fliers. Lost one to flight Found two that flew under pallets. A bit of a challenging day The new be I was working with. Was exceedingly frustrated. Mostly because she was comparing her speed of catching to mine. I have been finding and catching queens for way more than a decade. Not a fair comparison at all. In fact under the conditions. It was extreme;y hard to maintain any speed in the catch. The queen we last was mine. She did extremely well considering that this was her third stint at finding and catching queens. I think she exceeded expectations of a new beekeeper.
Today we amalgamated the frames. When one has raised all the queens needed for the season we convert all the mating nucs into honey producers.To do this we take 8 sides of our mating nucs and combine them into 2 x-ways boxes This is equivalent to a single main.
To do this we place 2 xways boxes on a lid and a bottom board. The bottom board is placed mid point in the flight path of the mating nucs. We fill the bottom box with frames of brood and bees. The one on the bottom board. The other box we put stores one each side which brood in the middle. Here is a shot of the x ways put together.
This system is also highly adaptable to an urban beekeeping system.
Once the boxes are filled shake the rest the bees in the box into the main hive.
This pic shows a fast way of doing it.
Roll the carpet inner cover to one side of the divider board they are stabled to. Pick up the box and tap the bottom corner. This will concentrate the bees in the bottom corner of each box. Turn the box 90 deg in the direction of the rolled inner cover and tap the top corner of the box on the x-ways box. This will dump all the bees in the x-ways. Take the nuc box to another part of the yard and pace the box on end. The remain bees will return to the old location and settle on the x-ways which will be the only hive in the area that 4 nucs were.
