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Originally Posted by Iowanian
My welfare apartment hive had a lot of dead bees in the bottom, already has hive beetle issues and some roaches. I'm going to pinch the queen soon and replace her and see if they can be turned into something useful.
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So, again, THANKS so much for this awesome and interesting thread!! I've said it before but will keep saying it because I really do appreciate it. Very cool stuff!
Help the idiot time again though (sorry, but I'm confident I'm not the only one who doesn't know this stuff!):
1. "welfare apartment hive"?
2. "Pinch the queen and replace her". So pinch the queen sounds easy enough -- remove her -- but how do you just replace her? Are you able to identify a young queen in another hive and just move her to the other hive? Are queens available for sale? Do you trade queens with other beekeepers? Amazon literally has EVERYTHING from A to Z?!?
3. Separate question -- do you have to keep your hives reasonably far apart from each other? I have no idea if they are territorial, but in a prior post you were discussing a war between your strongest hive and a foreign invader. If you had hives close to each other, it would seem to me the risk of that would always be there.
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The hive I got from the cemetery swarm a couple of years ago is roaring....enough bees I'm afraid they will swarm. I'm considering doing a split with that hive soon.
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So I get that the swarm needs a queen. How do you split the hive? Can you just get some queen from somewhere and put it into a new hive complex and then physically move a bunch of bees from the existing hive to the new hive and then it's all good?
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I hope to get some swarm traps out this weekend or soon after. I'm pretty excited to see if I can make that work.
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Glad to hear all your hives survived, and good luck with the trapping!!
It sounds like you're at three hives right now. Is there a number you're aiming to get to?
Last, do you take your hives out to pollinate for farmers or anything? I remember learning about that a decade or so ago when we had the scare where alot of bees were dying. I never knew that was even a thing, but obviously that's another way to make money on the hive.