Went in to do my honey harvest/deep inspection a few days ago and discovered wed been seriously robbed... whoops. Fortunately the bottom box (TBH) still had nearly all of its honey stores and plenty of pollen but MY honey.. well.. Im trying not to think about it. I suppose the silver lining is that I have plenty of gorgeous (empty) drawn comb that I will keep and give them next year. Another thing that really startled me is that I have a different queen!! I am extremely sad that CC is gone but Im wondering what could have happened. I know that I saw her during the last inspection (it was about 2 weeks prior, I couldnt get in to do the 7-10 day inspection because of weather) so is it possible that the robbing colony killed her and replaced her? The new queen is TINY (relatively). She definitely looks like a queen but is barely larger than the workers, so I suspect feral bloodlines. The colony was relatively calm. Any comments or thoughts? Is it possible for a robbing colony to take over a hive colony, replacing the queen? CC was a very strong queen (this colony has been thriving from the get-go) and she was HUGE. There are still a lot of bees in there (and there werent queen cups or cells in the last inspection) so I dont think shes swarmed off with an entourage. There were eggs and various stages of brood, as well as capped brood so it doesnt look like there was much interruption (if any) of laying. (Not a lot of any of them, but tis the season to be slowing down.) The next day I could see the robbers were back: a LOT of hovering activity around the front and some battles on the landing board, so I closed up all of the small ventilation holes and put an entrance reducer on the front, leaving only about 4 of space for them to defend. Within a half hour things were calm again. (And now its cold, so the reducer is staying on).
Posted on: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 14:55:42 +0000
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