Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
the foragers. Then, at the end of the day, you put the dummy hive onto the moved hive.
That evening, block the entrance with grass and, by the time the bees manage to chew
their way out, they will have gathered that something is different and may then take
new orientation flights. You may need to repeat this procedure until the foragers learn
where they are meant to be. I've done this with not too many problems but, as I said, it
is laborious.
Seeing problems on your inspections
If on an inspection you see no eggs and no young larvae, but you do see a marked queen,
you have a problem. Unless you can replace this queen quickly, your colony will soon
dwindle as older workers die and are not replaced by younger bees. Sooner or later the
queen will disappear, and you will end up with a laying-worker situation. It is evident
in this example that the queen has stopped laying and something needs to be done.
Problems with the queen can strike at any time. Sometimes a queen will simply stop
laying due, perhaps, to some genetic fault, or because she has been damaged during one
of your inspections. This happens much more frequently than beekeepers think. The
brood pattern of a healthy colony is an ellipse of sealed brood cells neatly waxed over
with slightly raised wax cappings (see Photograph 2 in the colour photograph section
of this topic). Around this mass of sealed cells should be open cells with pearly white
larvae in them and, as you look towards the edge of this area, the larvae become younger
until, finally, you simply see eggs. The outer edges of this 'arc' of brood are often the
stores area for honey although, in healthy colonies that are building up swiftly in the
spring, the brood frames are usually just slabs of brood.
The above may not be exactly what you see but that is the general idea. Any areas of
capped brood with too many uncapped, empty cells that give a spotty or pepper-pot
appearance mean trouble. It could be that inbreeding is causing the queen to lay too
many non-viable eggs and the workers are removing them, or it could be the result of
diseases, such as AFB or European foul brood (EFB) (see Chapter 10). The worst sight
of all is a brood pattern with, mostly, empty cells and isolated drone cells made out of
worker-sized cells (see Photograph 3 in the colour photograph section of this topic).
