Bees & Beekeeping: Present & Past
Treatment of a Colony’s Resident Queen After an Influx of Foreign Bees
Using locally reared queens selected for local conditions is a smart and proven way for bee businesses to thrive. My concern after studying bees for over 50 years regards a fundamental weakness in raising these queens. The queens are not available early in the spring In Virginia, unlike queens from the South.
To have locally adapted queens in early spring, I have been exploring ways of wintering small top-bar nucs in my bee house, obviously with each nuc providing one queen in early spring. This kind of wintering seems doable with a high probability of success.
The second phase will be much, much more difficult with a high probability of failure. It has been on my mind since my work with queen introduction for some 20 years. I want each nuc to winter with and care for 5-12 queens, depending somewhat on the microconditions in the nuc’s cluster. So instead of having 30 queens in early spring, 30 small observation nucs would survive with something closer to 300 queens.
Originally for wintering locally adapted queens, I wanted single-comb nucs I because I could see everything in the hives. While I did learn how to efficiently ventilate the hives (no wet glass inside the observation hives), the winter survival was essentially zero. Early in the winter, the bee attrition from the small clusters was usually high, particularly from the bottom of the cluster, expected to be the coldest. The early attrition was mostly because the bees were in contact with the glass. Glass conducts the heat away from the cluster if the bees touch it. However, the clusters survived it. The same damage pattern occurred with quarter-inch plexiglass, which is not as heat-conductive as glass. Later in the winter, the small clusters, already stressed, could not survive when the temperature fell to single digits. Here in my location of Piedmont Virginia of the mid-Atlantic, single-digit temperatures occur occasionally in January and February, and only for a few days at a time.
With so many detrimental results with wintering single-comb hives, continuing with them would have been just plain stubborn, and stubbornness leads to stagnation in bee research. So while not completely abandoning the single-comb hives, I needed to shift my focus to having more combs in the hives.
Back in 2000, I designed a wide platform on the observation hive to stabilize it on the center entrance pipe for rotation to see both sides of the comb quickly, and to hold up to three combs horizontally. I had wintered a few 3-comb hives successfully. I figured it would be fairly routine to work out the technical details to have 3-comb colony survival become routine. For death with 1-comb hives, and survival with 3-comb hives, the logical configuration to investigate was the Goldilocks middle size, just two combs.
(Removing a third of the comb space is a big deal in these small colonies. I want the smallest feasible colony, because if successful, there could be hundreds of these hives.) In the fall of 2025, I had five 2-comb hives in the bee house. Three additional single-comb hives were present too, all at the end of queen cell and queen bee research work. I could use them, first doubling the combs of the three hives …
