I ordered 25 more queen bees today. They should be here by this weekend and I will try once more to requeen my colonies. I had to purchase 25 to get a price break. $2.00 a head will be worth the extra queens. I only need 14. I will try to sell the ones I don’t need and try to get some of my money back.  I have two beekeepers who will take six of them. That will leave only five. Maybe I will find a buyer for them.

Just to recap, the reason to requeen in the Fall is because a young queen will lay longer into the Fall and Winter than an older queen. The older queen will start shutting down massive egg laying to a trickle in November for the winter. The young queen will not be as apt to shut down until into December because she is not that experienced and will continue to lay lots of eggs until the workers stop feeding her as much. When that happens, the queen will not be able to produce an abundance of eggs. In the Spring, they will start feeding her more food and that will trigger her egg production.

I really wanted to be able to pull honey before I requeened, but things have a habit of coming up at a most inopportune time. So I will just have to manhandle the honey supers to work the bees. I will just have to requeen and go back to pull honey at a later time. Maybe this is a good thing. I may have to share the honey, that I was going to extract, with some of the colonies that do not have enough of their own honey to winter well.

I also have two meetings, that I have not committed to yet, that I have to get honey bottled to sell and get my observation hive cleaned up so I may show and tell. That is a great crowd getter. The more people that stops to look at the bees and listen to the bee talk, the more possible sales of honey.

I’ll let you know how the re queening and the preparations for the  festivities goes as soon as I can.

You still need to be cleaning your equipment, putting new foundation in your frames and painting the boxes. All this is in preparation of the spring swarms and splitting. If it gets done now, you will not have to rush rush rush to get a box ready when you need it.

Until the next time, keep your hive tool sharp, your smoker cleaned and ready, and read books, magazines, and surf the web for bee information.