There are 4 types of queen bees: swarm, uterus of quiet change, fistulous and artificial.
All of these uterus can be divided into two groups:
- the first is swarm and quiet shift;
- the second is fistulous and artificial.
I plan to write four articles about each type of uterus separately and start this cycle, I decided with fistulous!
Before I tell you about the technology for the removal of fistulous uterus, I want to immediately clarify. I do not divide the uterus according to the method of withdrawal, into good and bad. In any of these four types of queens, there are pros and cons.
9 days before the start of the main bribe, I remove old queens from the families. A family without a uterus becomes orphaned and lays fistulous queen cells.
On day 5, I cut out all the closed queen cells and leave 3-4 open. Thus, I do not allow the uterus to be removed from older larvae. More to climb into the hive is optional.
I do a flyby control of the young fistulous uterus on the 30th day after the old one is removed.
Why do I perform this operation 9 days before the main bribe? Because by the time the bribe begins, the family has no open brood, that is, no one needs to be fed. All brought nectar will be processed into marketable honey.
In addition, the absence of an open brood frees the young bee from feeding. She earlier begins to take part in intra-hull work related to the construction and acceptance of the brought nectar. And also she will become a flying bee earlier. In other words, the family fully and with all its strength focuses on honey collection.
Of course, after such a procedure, when the family had a break of 30 days and a young bee did not arise, we will see at the end of the bribe a picture of severe subsidence. There will be a lot of honey, and few bees. therefore this method should not be used in two cases.
- When the interval between one main bribe and the second is short. The family simply does not have time to gain the necessary strength in order to work out the second main bribe.
- And in case we do this on the last bribe, and he is late, for example, on a sunflower. In this case, the family may not have time to build up the required number of wintering bees.
This method of withdrawal of fistulous uterus is simply ideal for those beekeepers who have only one main bribe at the beginning or in the middle of summer.
Also, this method allows you to bring yourself and spare queens in nuclei. For this, it is not necessary to cut fistulous queen cells, but it is advisable to transfer a frame with a bee and queen cell to the nucleus.
This should be done 2 days before leaving the uterine queen cell. If you do not need spare uterus, and the task is simply to increase the apiary, you can form layers on such a framework. Only in this case it is necessary to transfer not only one frame with the bee and the queen cell, but add at least one or two frames with a printed brood at the exit and the bee. By the way, it is not necessary to do such layering from one family, it can be made prefabricated!
As my many years of practice have shown, fistulous uterus, bred in strong families, are obtained of excellent quality. And since each family removes its uterus itself (according to Kashkovsky VG), inbreeding will be completely excluded in the apiary. We will get genetically stable, strong and healthy families.
It is important to note that only a strong family can bring out a high-quality fistulous uterus, do not force a weak lay to do this.
A weak family will never bring out a quality uterus. This applies not only to fistulous, but also to any of the 4 species.
If this method is correctly entered into the technology of your beekeeping, you will not only receive more marketable honey annually, but also will go into the winter with young and productive uterus every season. And this is the key to a wonderful wintering and rapid spring development of your bee families.
