BREKEE PING
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cannot find the queen move the frames again from box B to A, checking for the queen.
Following the article by Breno Freitas in the last edition Beekeeping & Development, Professor William
of
Ramirez of Costa Rica has sent us some of his favoured techniques for finding the elusive lady. 2.
One of a beekeeper’s most time-consuming and tiresome activities is finding queen ina hive, especially when the colony has a large population of workers or the bees are very defensive The usual way is to take out each comb one by one from the brood chamber and examine both sides until the queen is found. This method disturbs the bees and induces robbing and defensive behaviour, especially in African bees
place in the apiary, put a new box (B} in the original site of box A, and put in it one comb with open brood surrounded by empty drawn combs or frames with wax foundation. Wait for three das until all the field workers have moved from box A to box B. By that time colony A will have only young bees, which are unable to fly and sting, plus the queen. Smoke hive A very gently, remove the supers and search for the queen in the combs of the brood nest
a
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P repare an
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Wilkan
Rare:
evanunes a colony of note the
bees clustering outside the hive \OWILLIAM RAMIREZ 8
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a bottom board (box B), move the
Africanized bees in Costa Rica
Ifa colony is very defensive and overpopulated, remove it (Aj to another
queenright hive (box A) to elsewhere in the apiary and place box B at the side of it. Smoke gently on the top-bars on one side of the hive and remove the first lateral comb, check for the queen, and move the comb to box B. Move all the combs to box B one by one, checking for the queen If she is not found on the combs. she may be on the lateral walls of box A where the last comb was removed, or on the bottom board. the queen is not found in the empty box (A) or on the bottom of the hive, shake the remaining bees on to a light coloured board and search for her there. If you still \f
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Take a queen cage {a Miller “pushing” is preferable) with an old, alive queen ar put it on top of the brood of the hive with the queen being searched for. Close the hive and open it again 20 minutes later, the queen being searched for will be found trying to fight with the introduced queen.
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Old dead queens kept in the freezer are useful Open the hive where y you need to P find a queen, and place a dead queen with a pin on a top-bar in the middle of the nest chamber. Close the hive and open it again 20 minutes later; the queen being searched for will be ‘fighting’ with the dead queen.
STING@.E Reading about stingless bees in Ghana in Beekeeping & Development 30 prompted a reader to send the following information about his experiences with stingless bees in Angola in 1959.
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A stack of newly built top-bar hives provides appropriate sealing on which to read Beekeeping & Development! Photograph sent by Martin Odima
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All beekeeping work in Angola is conducted with indigenous African honeybees Apis mellifera and also no less than seven species of Trigona, the stingless bee. These seven species of Trigona have been identified by Senhor José Nufies Three of these stingless bee species, the tree dwellers, are living happily in hives of Senhor Nufies’ own design at Luso, but the others, which live underground, have so far always succumbed to temperature differences in surface hives This has not ted Senhor Nufies, who plans to na hive in a shaft which will be d to the surface for examination and returned to a gloomy but
