# Queens attracted to bulk bee bins, both virgin and mated



## humbee (Dec 12, 2010)

After a day of shaking bees I put the bins in the shade, that evening and the next day there were several mated queens and a few virgins clinging to the sides. What was more strange to me was that one of the bins I had put two caged mated queens inside, and they also had mated queens on the outside screen.
The only reason i can come up with is that some of my mated queens were getting ready to leave from there nucs and ended up on the bin. Also the virgins were about to take flight and were attracted to the ( Artificial swarm). any feed back ?? :scratch:


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## David LaFerney (Jan 14, 2009)

Got any pictures? What are you shaking bulk bees for?


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## humbee (Dec 12, 2010)

David LaFerney said:


> Got any pictures? What are you shaking bulk bees for?


To make the last round of mating nucs before the year is up and to fill out weaker ones.
don't have pictures. 
I did try something different a couple weeks ago,I grafted cells in the early evening and put them back into the bulk bins and stuck them into the shade, and they fed them just fine.


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## AR Beekeeper (Sep 25, 2008)

What precautions did you take to keep from shaking queens from the colonies into the bulk bins?


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## PARKBOY (Apr 30, 2010)

David LaFerney said:


> Got any pictures? What are you shaking bulk bees for?


Pictures of that would be GREAT!!!!!!


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

I know mated queens can fly. Had a strange experience once, I took a queen from a nuc, marked and caged it, and used it to requeen a nearby hive that had an old queen.

I ran short of cells so did not return to that yard for 8 days. When I got back and checked the hive 8 days after the caged queen had gone in, it was queenless. So when I went to put a cell in the nuc, I noticed young larvae. Had a further look, and there was the queen, back in there.


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## rrussell6870 (May 14, 2009)

Have seen that several times... I always mark the hives as being "Perma-Queens" (permanent queens). Lol. We shake bulk bees for the same reasons as humbee... I may be able to take some pics of the equipment and explain the process if you guys think it may be useful to you... what parts are of the most interest?


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Be interested in anything you can say about that Robert. I should add to my last post, that the queen was newly mated, so presumably remembered the location of her nuc. But it made me wonder, if she'd been put in a hive a long distance away and then flown, would it have returned to the new hive or just dissapeared?

Any thoughts?


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## rrussell6870 (May 14, 2009)

My experiences have been in reverse of yours (queen from a hive placed into a nuc, but returns to the hive)... but yes, they are usually newly mated queens that are the product of cells placed in the hives after removing the old queen... we would pull nucs, with the young queen and set them up about 2 miles away, but these girls would go home, even when the workers would not. Lol. It's a rarity, but interesting enough to just go ahead and let them have the hives that they seem to want so badly... 

I will get some pics in the morning if I can't locate some tonight and post them for you. Should we post them here, or start a new thread?


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

OK well I started one, here it is:-

http://www.beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?260389-Can-mated-queens-fly&p=708192#post708192


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## David LaFerney (Jan 14, 2009)

I for one would be interested in learning some basics about producing bulk bees. I started a thread to that effect a while back and pretty much just got "you need to work for a producer if you want to learn that" probably good advice, but not all that useful to me. No desire to corner the package market, just want to know how to shake out some bees for nucs without crippling the mother hives.


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## rrussell6870 (May 14, 2009)

What is the title of that thread David? I will take a crack at it if I can find it.

Oldtimer, in the new thread, did you want to discuss bulk bee methods or drifting queens?


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## rrussell6870 (May 14, 2009)

Well here are a few pics of the Russell shaker funnels... hope this works, I am trying to do all of this directly from my cell phone and hoping that the images are of small enough file size for beesource...

This shows a funnel over one side of one of our duplex mating nucs...









A closer look...









This shows a funnel with one cage in and one on top so you can get a better idea of what the cage looks like... these cages fill to 4.5#s, which is what goes in our "3#" packages...









This gives a closer look at the sliding action of the cages... being able to slide the cage rack sideways gives us the ability to close off the funnel (thus closing both cages at once) as well as the ability to continue shaking into the next cage, while the first is removed by another worker and dumped into a package...


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## David LaFerney (Jan 14, 2009)

I don't see a queen-screen so I'm guessing you find the queen before shaking bees or you shake from above an excluder?

That thread I mentioned is How to shake bulk bees?

BTW, thanks for the mini cages.


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## rrussell6870 (May 14, 2009)

This is a 15#-20# shaker box... its essentially a deep with heavy screen framed into the sides and a 5 1/2" hole in the long side to allow room for a gloved hand to scoop bees out with a can or cup... the lid for this hole is just a flush board with a screw in one corner so it can swing over the hole to cover it.









These cages are not fed or shipped, but rather are spritzed with a very lite mixture of sugar water and used to stock nucs as quickly as possible...

For long distance transfers of bulk bees, I use 30# arks... all of which are in another state currently, so I can't give you a pic of them... but they large boxes with screened sides and a spaced system that allows five deep frames to be added to them with an inch space between each frame... a queen bank frame can be added to them as well for transferring queens or virgins to and from islands or long drives... they are about twice as deep as a deep frame x the length of a frame x almost 2' wide... when transporting bulk bees for long periods, frames of honey and pollen can be placed inside to provide safe feeding and a lite mist of water can be sprayed on the screens to keep them cool... these cages hold the equivalent of 10, 3# packages of bees, so heat is more of a concern than most anything else, and syrup can caused them to produce much more heat than capped honey combs... the arks are stocked by placing the combs in, then dumping the bees in one cage at a time... during this time, the bees are kept wet with a lite mist so they do not fly... once the ark is filled, the top (full size, framed screen) is placed on it and latched down... when it is time to use the bees, we simply place a sealed plywood box over the ark, insert a 1/4" poly tube it a small hole in one side, and attach the other end of the tube to a co2 tank to put the bees to sleep... then the box and the frames are removed and the bees are simply scooped from the ark into buckets that workers will carry along with them as they fill nucs with scoops of sleeping bees...


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## rrussell6870 (May 14, 2009)

We do have excluders that are cut to fit down inside the funnel, but they are used for keeping drones out of the packages and bulk bees... yes, we locate the queen, and the frame that she is on is handed to someone to keep an eye on her while pretty much every bee in the box is shaken... my father liked to shake absolutely every bee he could out of each hive, leaving only the bees on the frame with the queen... it worked well, but could sometimes cause a slight delay in their recovery if a snap freeze occurred... my rule of thumb is to shake an equal number of frames of bees to the number of frames of capped brood... this leaves plenty of bees to cover open brood, while still giving you 3-6#s of bulk bees per hive... the capped brood will soon emerge and the colony will be once again filled with bees and tge queen has room to lay it up again... creating the ability to shake or pull nucs all over again in less than a month...


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## David LaFerney (Jan 14, 2009)

Your talking about early spring there - right? So, you can do that 2 or more times, then what happens to that hive? Rest and recover for the rest of the season, or does it bounce back into production?

Do you mean that you shake the bees off of the capped brood frames, or just that many frames?

Our local (mid TN) honey production guru Ed Holcomb said that last year (a good year in this area) he produced packages AND heavy honey crops from the same hives. Unfortunately there wasn't an opportunity to get much more detail than that about it.

This year, many hives (mine included) were overflowing with bees in March, and in danger of swarming in early April - then because of rain, had to be fed until about the first of May despite good forage. I'm thinking it might have been better to shake some out in March to help prevent swarming (and stock mating nucs) and by the time the honey flow really got going around May 1 the honey hives still would have been strong.


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## rrussell6870 (May 14, 2009)

That's correct and actually, a very good subject that does not get enough attention... yes, we shake bulk bees from our hives several times per spring as well as pull nucs from them and still get averages of 200#+ in production... the reasons are based on timing and space... as we all know, a good queen can out lay any colony... so long as she sees the need, space, and food supply to do so... allowing them enough room to build up in spring is the first step... this is why I prefer using supers of stores on top of all of our hives instead of allowing the chambers to be packed with honey to the point that they must go through several small brood cycles to consume enough of it to create a large brood cycle... in spring, I open up the chambers even more by removing honey frames and letting the bees rib them out in the open yard... this fills there guts with better nutrition than syrup which helps to prevent nosema and other guttural infections... at the same time, it signals the queens to begin laying heavily as there is a false flow at the sane time as the early pollen flow... and it gives her open combs to lay in... the colony builds quickly as she lays every available frame, and the super becomes the food source for the brood as soon as the robbed honey has run its course... this is where timing comes in... freezing temps can kill brood if you take the bees too early, or if you stimulate them too early, so timing for each region is slightly different... so it needs to be timed right, but as a fail-safe, the queens are usually smart enough not to over do it if they sense another freeze coming, instead they will move up closer to the super, which is your sign to know that you are starting too early... because the queen lays so many new frames of brood in such a short time, the brood all emerges in a relatively short amount of time and the food source being pulled from the super for each new wave of brood creates an open overhead to keep the swarm instinct at bay... then by shaking these young surplus bees, the colony immediately deems it necessary to produce another full wave of brood to offset the loss rates (bees that we are taking)... using this method, we are able to keep an average or 12-14 frames of solid brood (wall to wall) going all spring... when we stop taking bulk bees, we can pull nucs from the hives, opening up the brood nest by inserting foundation as the replacements for the frames that we take to make nucs... switching the bees from brood rearing frenzy to comb building... the huge amount of young bees usually can build an entire deep of foundation in less than a week, and the queen lays it up while the bees switch their focus to foraging...


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## rrussell6870 (May 14, 2009)

David LaFerney said:


> This year, many hives (mine included) were overflowing with bees in March, and in danger of swarming in early April - then because of rain, had to be fed until about the first of May despite good forage. I'm thinking it might have been better to shake some out in March to help prevent swarming (and stock mating nucs) and by the time the honey flow really got going around May 1 the honey hives still would have been strong.


That's correct... we shake our packages in Feb, and then bulk bees for stocking nucs in march, and then nucs and brood frames up until about mid April... when all of this is complete, the hives are bursting with young bees full of fresh comb, and even more prepared for the main flow (mid April - mid may) than they would have been if they had taken all of that time to build up after a swarm...

One of the greatest restrictions on peoples bees are the fears of the bee keeper... 

Midway through that main flow, we install another deep above the chambers, beneath the supers... they draw this out quickly, fill it with brood and a bead of pollen and honey, then we take it off as a split and put a queen in it and a deep of foundation on top... by the end of the main flow, the splits are double deeps and working on filling their first super... meanwhile the original hives are working on their fourth or fifth super...


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## David LaFerney (Jan 14, 2009)

What does one of these hives look like going into winter - besides big and health of course?


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## Ted Kretschmann (Feb 2, 2011)

Looks like the same shaker box and funnel Russell's Men used shaking my bees!! You want to screw up a queen mating yard-carry the shaker box of bees into a mating yard longer than you should. You end up with every Virgin and freshly mated queen on the screen of the box attracted by the pheromones, sounds and racket the bees make. Thus the beek that posted this thread has learned.TED


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## rrussell6870 (May 14, 2009)

David LaFerney said:


> What does one of these hives look like going into winter?


Double or triple deep brood chambers with some backfill in the upper most chamber, honey bands on just about every frame of brood and a full super or two on top (depending on what we use to top off splits... we do not extract much, but instead use our supers to feed splits and open feed in the yards for stimulation and to give them more room to expand)... I will try to get you some pics, but its hard to show each frame and describe where it will be in the hive, so if you can think of any particular questions, fire away...


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## rrussell6870 (May 14, 2009)

Ted Kretschmann said:


> Looks like the same shaker box and funnel Russell's Men used shaking my bees!!


LOL. We run about 30 of them, and they are the main design that we use... there are actually two different funnels in the pics, but considering which location one of them was in, it could very well be the same one that the guys used in AL. 

You about ready to set up a package and queen operation over there the boost the AL industry again?


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## David LaFerney (Jan 14, 2009)

Thanks, I think I get the picture. But I'm starting to wonder if the key to healthy bees is to not harvest honey.

I mentioned in another thread that I thought better foragers might deal with SHB better. What I really meant was hives with plenty of stores. Nutrition in other words.

Ever do any work on a nutritionally formulated honey replacement? Is there such?


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## rrussell6870 (May 14, 2009)

Nutrition is extremely important, but bees can produce so much surplus that you can extract... I think one thing that would help many people is to never shrink to just a double...(migratory operations are the exception because of weight and uniformity for stacking of course)... but by keeping one super on year round you add resources to provide better nutrition and require less feeding, if any...


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## valleyman (Nov 24, 2009)

If you are leaving your hives with 2 deep and a medium thru the winter in Ms. then some of the rest of us aren't doing ours right. I know some here in Ky. that are leaving 1 deep, which I consider a large gamble, especially if we have a bad, long winter. I assume you are allowing the queen to expand the brood nest into the medium super if she wants. I have 1 of my SKC queens that has expanded into the medium super. It doesn't have a lot of honey anyway so I had already decided to leave it. the only worry is that if the flow doesn't improve within a week or 2 I am going to have to feed, and I don't know about the food being that high. Will the cluster succesfully come up into the medium? Or should I take off the super while I'm feeding so they will put it in the 2 deeps? Just when I thought I had something figured out you throw me for a loop. I fully understand and agree with the nutrition being probably the most important thing with bees health. All other problems are secondary compared to nutrition. I understand that you are talking about getting you hives ready for quick spring buildup so you can split, build nucs, and have plenty of bees for whatever you need them for. Correct me if I'm not right in thinking that it would also be conducive to a large honey crop.


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## rrussell6870 (May 14, 2009)

You are correct. Here is what I try to do...

I want all of my hives to come to a basic standard of two deeps and a super... the super being full of capped honey and the top deep being somewhat backfilled... when I make splits early, I place a deep of foundation on them immediately so they can build up to a double, and as soon as they do that, I add a super... if I want to test their abilities, j continue to add supers every time they get 60+% of on filled out...

When I make splits late, I put a super directly on top of the deep chamber that I moved as the split... once this is filled out 60+% of the way, I will make a judgement call as to whether or not I expect enough flow coming to lift the super and place a deep of foundation beneath it, or to add another super, or just leave it alone to winter as a single and a half... 

So my average singles are a deep with a super or two... my average doubles are two deeps with a super or two... I say average because I have many eight frame hives that I use simply for studies that are deeps only... so their singles are one deep, doubles are two deeps and triples are three deeps... etc...

The way I look at it, a super is roughly half of a deep, so it can be filled and capped in half of the time and half of the resources... so even though it adds another size or two of equipment to keep up with, it is a safe and easy way to let them store their own food which will be better for them to live off of that any syrup that I can give them... it leaves more room for brood, promoting a larger colony size, earlier build up, and less swarm concerns, thus more bees to produce more honey...

With a full super always on the hives, I know that I am never taking more than their surplus if I only take from supers above that point... so instead of knocking them down all the way by taking everything except the chambers, you leave a completely self contained hive that always has enough good to get it through tough times... 

Some hives will boom and use that food up completely at the beginning of a flow, but they are able to relace it quite easily as they have such high populations from the queen being able to lay the entire hive... some people keep single deeps because they feel that smaller spaces are easier to warm, there is a little truth to that, but the general point is that they only heat the brood, not the entire space of the hive... heat rises and so the insulation created by a full super above them and the sides of the chambers being filled with capped honey makes their job a bit easier... the food above them gives them a place to move to if they need to escape the draft of the entrance a bit more and they will move back down in spring as they begin to emerge and pack the super full of honey once more...

The other great thing about using supers is again that they are half as much work to fill for the bees, so they are easy to use to feed splits... when I move a chamber of bees, brood, pollen, original queen, and two frames of honey to a new bottom, I place a super on top... they can more easily fill the super than another deep, or if its late and I do not expect to have enough flow for them to draw and fill comb, I can place a full capped super on top and they are set for winter... no feeding, great nutrition... that way they can boom healthily in spring and I have my choice as to whether or not I what them to expand into more supers, a deep above the chamber, or a deep if foundationless frames below the chamber...

Since I do not extract honey to sell, I have many colonies that go through winter with several supers on top... the extra supers can be used to feed splits that have used more than I assumed that they would, or packages that I start from left over bulk bees in spring... again, no feeding needed, and optimal nutrition... making feeding only necessary for stimulation to get them to do something that they wouldn't normally do... 

Hope this helps.


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