Do I get any points for this one?!
G.
http://www.sbai.org.uk/images/champion%20cell.jpg
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Do I get any points for this one?!
G.
http://www.sbai.org.uk/images/champion%20cell.jpg
That is the queen cell equivalent of having hair extensions.
Whacky! These bees have not been near the cannabis-supplemented rape field. There is another I didn't photograph with a big circle of comb over the Q cell. They'll need trimmed to fit into an Apidea later.
They do that sometimes and can even draw out the entire frame below the cells which remain entombed. They are still viable and just need a bit of trimming. You might get something looking like Cheryl Cole coming out of that cell in the first picture.
Jon, a thought worked its way through the porrige that's my brain yesterday. The avatar I use on the BBKA site with bees clustering around a hive may well have been bees coming back from a mating flight. (The armchair elsewhere is a different thing altogether!) It was 2 or 3 years ago; the hive had a virgin queen inside and a swarm issued - and came back. The queen was laying shortly after - a couple of days- from memory. I put down the swarm to something else at the time, although I wasn't convinced. I would have a strong suspicion that they followed her out on a mating flight. Why would a colony fly out and come back again?
I posted on the other mating swarm thread that a cluster which settled just outside my apiary which I tipped into an apidea two days ago had eggs in it today.
I also found eggs in another apidea.
The timeline of this one is as follows.
I had a large colony swarm in my garden on Friday 1st July. The queen was clipped and luckily I found her back inside. I did an artificial swarm and grafted into the queenless part that same evening. A dozen cells were started. The cells hatched on 12th and 13th July in Apideas and I found eggs in the first of them today, 26th July.
Attachment 744
I was reading through a Brother Adam book yesterday and he wrote of the average failure rate for queens to return from mating. I.e. for every 100 queens that flew, how many didn't come back.
What do you think the percentage is?
Some get lost on orientation flights before they even take mating flights as I often find queens have disappeared before they could have flown and mated, around 4-5 days from emerging.
I would say this year about 25% are getting lost but last year it was worse.
You lose a few at every stage- grafts not started, cells which don't hatch, cells which hatch but queen has deformed wings, orientation flights, mating flight, introduction to a colony.
Plus some get destroyed by wasps, or a careless beekeeper can let them starve and abscond.
I found one which had been overrun by wasps and there were only two bees in it. Fortunately one of them was the queen and I put her in a roller cage with a single attendant and placed this in an apidea from which I had removed the queen last week.
I released her after 48 hours and I noticed she was laying today. She had looked like a mated queen even though there were no eggs in the apidea which was overrun.
Brother Adams percentage was 18% failure. Bees that thend to drift (and hence rob) such as Italians were worse than others, so I guess their navigation is just not as good.
I would be happy with 18% losses but even bumbling around we have 72 queens mated and none of them look jaundiced either.