Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
feeding stuff grass into the entrances to reduce them to one bee way. After splitting
colonies, reduce the entrances to the splits to one bee way until the colonies have
grown in numbers.
Make sure all your hives have crack-free boxes and joins.
Treat robbing seriously. It disrupts and destroys colonies and is highly instrumental in
spreading disease.
There will probably come a time when you will have to unite one colony with another.
There is a variety of reasons for this. For example, a colony may have lost its queen and
have dwindled because you did not have a replacement queen. To utilize the remaining
bees, you could unite these with a healthy colony. Or you may have carried out the
artificial swarm procedure to prevent swarming but don't need the extra colony. Some
weeks later, you could unite the two parts. This may help your honey flow - remember,
one big colony is better than two smaller ones.
Before uniting colonies, however, it is essential that you know the reason why you are
doing this. For example, if a colony is queenless or weak, you should know why. It would
be pointless uniting this hive with another if it had a disease: you would be giving the
disease to the healthy hive. So, before uniting colonies, check for disease. Also, if you
have a good queen you want to keep in the healthy, large colony, make sure that, when
you unite this colony with a weaker colony, the latter hasn't got a queen in it you didn't
find. Murphy's Law states that, on an occasion such as this, the two queens will fight
and the better one will lose.
The problem with uniting colonies is that you are trying to combine two units of bees
that will immediately fight each other when you put them together and, in the process,
you will lose lots of bees and possibly one or both of the queens. You have to convince
the bees they are not enemies so that they unite peacefully. You can do this in two main
ways.
