Air Bee and Bee for an unpleasant guest

[Paula Breen]

Good morning Bee Friends,

I have a hot hive in Martinez that I need to contend with this weekend. They have already stung the neighbors multiple times so asking for their patience is not an option. My plan is to split the hive down into smaller manageable parts and move them somewhere else where they won't be a nuisance to humans. I'm wondering if anybody out that way may have some property that is accessible where the bees will be far enough away from people and I can park them for several weeks while I requeen. I would prefer not to euthanize them because I haven't even assessed what the problem is yet. It could be a very fixable issue, but they can't stay where they are beyond this weekend. If you have a place where they could shack up temporarily I would be grateful. Please let me know.

Paula 

[gmau...@earthlink.net]

Hey Paula...  Last fall Denrie and I split up a couple highly defensive colonies for Sister Barbara.  Denrie took splits with the queens and I turned the balance into mating NUCs for Queen cells that I had grafted from Sister Barbara's best hive.  While relating the experience, Robert Mackimme  mentioned that hot hives will very often reject introduced queens and/or queen cells and will do everything possible to draw their own queen... even if it was from a less than ideal larvae.  Because I didn't want to risk propagating the hot genetics, I went into all the NUCs about 10 days later, found that the introduced cells had hatched, and nixed all the queen cells that had been drawn (and there was a lot of them!).  Even though I only spotted a few of the emerged queens during my cell mashing,  I ended up with six mated queens out of the eight mating NUCs set up...  Greg