This morning, Taylor, Lauren, and I checked the nuke that we had placed queen cells into. I did not know what to expect, so it was really interesting. Out of the three sections, the first queen cell had emerged and the colony looked just fine. The second section also had an emerged queen but the bees were making supercedure cells. These might be mistaken for swarm cells, but are quite different. Taylor gave me a really great explanation of the difference. Swarm cells are relatively easy to tell and they are on the sides of the comb. These are for when the bees might want to swarm. Supercedure cells, as we saw, are in the middle of the comb. These are for an entirely new queen becuase the current queen is old, worn out, or weak. The bees in this section might have made the supercedure cells before the queen emerged as an insurance becuase they had no queen yet. The third section was in the worst situation, with no emerged queen and multiple supercedure cells on each side of the comb (again in the middle). We did not know why the bees would do this. One possibility was that the queen cell that we placed in there was not that great.
We did not want to do anything, such as squish down the extra queen cells, until we had talked to Kwao. It was very interesting and am I reading up more about the process and the types of cells. I have found beesource.com to be useful except that the article I was reading was about Langstroth instead of top-bar. The article is here: http://www.beesource.com/point-of-view/walt-wright/are-they-supersedure-or-swarm-cells/
Went to the beach today and did lots of reading as well.
Keep the Bees.
No comments:
Post a Comment