My Two Queen Hive
08/29/2012 2 Comments
According to what I’ve read, there is about a 10% chance that you will have a hive with more than one queen. I guess I’ve reached critical mass with the number of my hives to have found my first!
I normally don’t put queen excluders on my hives. But earlier this summer I had a situation where the queen had moved into the 2nd and 3rd super and had completely abandoned the brood boxes. I went through the process of finding her, putting her in the lower boxes and adding an excluder. I figured I would keep the excluder on until the brood had hatched, and the supers had been back-filled with honey.
Just yesterday I went looking into the supers to see if there was anything ready for harvest and I found brood…lots of it. I took off all the supers thinking that maybe there was a hole in the excluder, but it looked fine. Digging deeper I found brood in the deeps where it should be. So the only thing I can think is that I have two queens. Either there had been a mother and daughter in the hive all along, or I have heard of virgin queens getting lost and entering any hive they could find. I have upper and lower entrances on all my hives so it is possible this new queen could have come in through the top.
In any case, now I have to decide what to do. Either I split them up, or leave them as is and see if they survive the winter, then potentially combine them in the spring.
What an interesting post (I’ve added it to stumbleupon). Is it common practise in your region not to use queen excluders?
It’s up to the beekeepers preference. I’m of the mind to keep things as natural as possible, and I generally don’t have any issues without them.