Late Queens and Successful Mating

[Drew]

I'm sure it heavily depends on how quickly things start to cool off but does anyone with more experience know when raising them becomes a lost cause?

[Paul Zelenski]

There's still plenty of time, if the hive will be strong enough after taking a month off. It's usually not an issue of the queen, but the strength of the hive when the new queen is finally returned. Of course at some point the drones will get kicked out, but that's a month away, I would think

> On Aug 15, 2016, at 3:02 PM, Drew <drew...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm sure it heavily depends on how quickly things start to cool off but does anyone with more experience know when raising them becomes a lost cause?
>

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[James]

[James]

Good question!  Last year, I was droneless at the beginning of August.  Seemed odd to me.  But I've also observed that my attempts at raising queens in splits have been much less successful of late. Queens have been runty, bad laying pattern.  And I raise them more or less continually, so I can't blame it on a cold snap.   Not good for those of us trying to be self-sufficient.  Maybe pesticides, or maybe an infectious entity.  It would be nice if someone in research started looking at drone sperm counts and motility, but it could be a queen problem as well.  So you take your chances, but I'd probably go with a purchased queen at this point.

[Drew]

It's definitely been an experience, this being my first year deliberately attempting to raise queens. I notices that cells drawn on old comb tend not to be as long as those on newer to fresh comb. I've mostly been cutting cells and a tittle cell punching, I suppose it's also possible you have contaminated pollen; I learned early on not having adequate pollen in a split makes poor queen cells. Royal jelly being mostly protein and water even a little bit of bad pollen probably has a drastic effect on the quality of queens raised. I can;t remember when exactly my bees kicked the guys out but if I remember right they started really early clearing drone larva which caused me some wasp problems. Overall I've got some good queens out of it but there have been some bad ones and a lot of failed queens that either didn't emerge or didn't come back matted.

[Drew]

I started to get a little concerned after sitting down and figuring out when a batch of uncapped queen cells would potentially produce laying queen. Sept 5th just seems so late.  It's nice having options managing hives with extra queens around but at some point it's going to be a futile effort running boxes to raise them. Do they start kicking drones out in Oct. or in a month as in about 4 weeks from now; I should really keep a more detailed bee journal.