i've messed too much

[saskia]

a couple of weeks ago i created a nuc, in an attempt to save a queen (q A) whose colony was being destroyed by wasps. i had taken action against the wasps- loads of traps, tiny narrow entrance, but the colony seemed to have lost the will to fight against them and were letting them in, the wasps robbing out all their supplies, and killing bees. so as i say, i took a couple of frames of emerging brood and young bees from my strong colony, caged the robbed queen (qA), and popped them into a nuc, with some syrup and a frame of stores. Yesterday i looked into the strong colony, to see if there was any capped honey, (not much, been very unproductive season here) rationalise the supers, remove q excluder etc for winter, and found to my horror loads of q cells, looking as if something had emerged/started tearing down, a couple of sealed ones, ? maybe been stung thro'? i think i must have damaged the (qB)when i made up the nuc for qA. So now i have to cross my fingers and hope that qBs successor gets a good day's weather for mating. I suppose i'll check in a week or so, to see if there are any eggs. (none now, or any unsealed brood). Meanwhile, i have qA in the nuc. if qB successor doesn't start laying, should i add in the nuc queen qA, so the large colony has a queen? would i have to find the non- laying queen first, if she's there? It seems rather late to be doing any of this messing around, ivy is about to come out, so there will be pollen at least . I'm a bit unsure of what best to do, wary of messing, as my efforts to save the q from the wasps has resulted in losing the q from my lovely large colony.

[Jon]

Is it possible you accidentally removed the queen from your strong colony on the frames you used to make up the nuc, or did you isolate her and make sure she stayed behind in the larger colony? That would explain the queen cells.
It has got a bit late for making up 2 frame nucs due to the wasp problem and the fact that they will not have a lot of time to build up for overwintering.
If you have one viable queen your best option might be to reunite the two colonies via newspaper after removing all the queen cells and or virgin queens from the larger colony - but you need to be careful not to lose your remaining queen.

[gavin]

We all make mistakes, and I've made my fair share this year. Better wasp traps might have been the answer. I'm glad to say that I haven't needed any this year.

Are there still bees and stores in the robbed colony which had qA? Maybe they could be used to bolster the small nuc and still leave you with (potentially) two colonies? If not I'd hesitate to use a queen which has had a narrow escape with robbing to head your one remaining colony. I had one last year like this and in the spring it failed to thrive, dying out in early summer. That had been a fairly strong (7 frame?) late summer colony which was decimated by wasps and seriously weakened.

It isn't unheard of to have queens mate in September. You may have to wait more than another week though to see a new queen in lay. If you have a recently hatched virgin then it would be a fortnight or longer before she starts.

Good luck anyway, and if it all goes wrong hopefully someone will help you out next spring.

G.

[Jon]

As Gav says, September is not to late to get a queen mated - but you are playing high stakes poker when you only have a colony or two. I still have 7 virgin queens in apideas and I hope to get some of them mated but if none of them mate, it won't be the end of the world either.

[Adam]

Is the nuc and queen A OK? Is she present and laying? If so then you can rescue the colony that has the queencells at some time - you have an insurance policy.

For the queencell colony you need to know exactly what's going on in there. The worry is that you may get a swarm if there is more than one queencell. Virgins are difficult to find - let alone if there are a couple in there which is possible if you have more than one open queencell. On the assumption that there are quite mature queencells there is an option which is little considered:- A colony will only swarm if there is a queen plus queencell. If there are several queens, they will not swarm; just fight it out. So if you don't know if there is a virgin queen in the hive you could attempt to release a virgin or two into the hive from the queencells present. Hopefully the strongest queen will win out. You do need to ensure that you don't leave any queencells in the hive though. To release the queens the tip of the queencell is removed - gently - with a sharp hive tool or tip of a penknife.

Note; queens that are destroyed by bees/queens are done from the back of the queencell - this is a reasonable indication that there's another queen present.

(I have removed queencells from frames and seen the queen moving from a small hole at the back of the cell where it was carefully removed, a good indication of readiness to emerge - they've also bee vibrating - piping when taken out too).

A proviso:- As all things bee. The only thing guaranteed is that there are no guarantees.