u/WarofFriends

I have an Allegheny grafted tree about 7 years old and 15 feet tall. I am not a fan of it; the fruit are all small and just bland banana flavor.

I have a wild type pawpaw planted nearby it that has large, really delicious fruit. Lovely melon & pineapple notes with a bit of funk on the finish.

The trees have the same growing conditions but the Allegheny is so thoroughly Meh, I'm thinking about trying to graft branches or buds onto the tree to add some varieties to it.

Has anyone taken this approach? What did you find worked and what didn't?

I planted two in my front yard 7 years ago. They are in direct sunlight with no shade. One I grew from seed, the other is Allegheny cultivar. They are both now about 15' tall and I'm wondering if they are going to continue to gain significant height? They are wonderful trees.

My company just laid off my entire team except for me. What the f*** do I do? AI does not enable me to work in a void.

Other teams are suffering too. Some have one or two people left. I'm guessing they're going to reorganize us into a group but no way all the projects survive. This is a death knell, imo.

I introduced three queens to two hives and a nuc about a week and a half ago. I introduced them with push-in Queen cages instead of a sugar plug type because I have more success with that.

Two accepted the Queens no problem but it's been a week and a half and I don't see any eggs in any of the boxes. Two of the boxes I've been feeding sugar water one to one. There's plenty of empty comb. In one of the boxes the hives are forming supercedure cells but they almost look like practice ones- no larvae in the cups.

Did I get a bad batch of mates queen? Should I wait any longer or should I just order more or ask for a refund?

edit: the third hive I'm not sure if they killed her or if I just didn't see her. She was accepted pretty readily, but there was no eggs in the third Hive either.

So I recently needed to replace two very spicy Queens with some calmer genetics but I am cursed with being absolutely awful at finding her highness.

What I did was I found the brood comb that showed the most recent amount of activity from her highness (eggs) and then put that comb and the ones adjacent to it into a nuc box, sealed it up and place it on top of the hive.

The next day so about 24 hours later, there are less bees in the nuc box because most of them have gone home to the main hive. This made finding the queen incredibly easy because there are much fewer bees to deal with on these frames. I was able to use this to find both of my spicy Queens.

Then I replaced the frames back in the main hive and put both of my spicy queens and queen cages. Now my mail order Queens are arriving and I can easily pinch the old ones and replace them!

I have a very old hen that is now 14 years old. I've had her her whole life, and besides some arthritis she still seems healthy. She used to be the boss chicken too.

However, for the last 3 years, every spring hormones take over and all 6 of my other hens decide they want to kill her.

Collectively, one day, something goes wrong and I find her, blood all over her face, huddled in the corner looking sad. Then I put the pinless peepers (the b* goggles) on ANYONE who even looks at her funny...she spends a few weeks getting her confidence back, and the others chill out.

The cycle continues. I am so tired of this. Why are chickens so mean to each other.

1. they have tons of room

2. they have on demand food and water

3. if she separated, she's be truly alone, she's 14 in a flock of 5-6 year old. Her older sisters all died, now she's the one granny in the group. I know being alone is terrible for chickens.

4. I've already given away the "aggressive" ones. I had some real b*'s I got rid of earlier last year, but now even the gentle ones are out for blood.

Follow up to https://www.reddit.com/r/Beekeeping/comments/1t6u9q2/bees_will_not_stop_swarming/

TLDR; when my bees swarmed, because it's very early did all of the Virgin Queens fail? Maybe due to lack of drones?

It's been a few weeks and on my most recent hive check I found a ton of Queen cells and no eggs no small larvae. There were nearly 20 Queen cells per Hive and a lot of them were emergency Queen cells.

I recognized this as an opportunity to requeen the hives and I pinched all of the queens and ordered some Italian Queens online that I installed yesterday.

I double checked the hives for more queen cells but they didn't have the resources to make anymore. Many of the queen cells were capped; so there's a possibility that there's virgin Queens lurking about in the hives.

I placed my new Italian Queens in push-in Queen introduction cages so they have access to the comb. In one of the hives there were some bees that had not yet emerged so I placed the queen over those cells.

I had given away some of the swarms to another beekeeper in my area and then kept a few of them myself. All of the older swarms except one are queenless; no eggs no larvae in those swarms. My newer swarms are also queenless or at least appear to be queenless.

Here's my theory and what I was hoping somebody on this forum let me know if it's plausible:

They were not a lot of drones in the hives.

Only the first swarm seemed to have a queen.

All subsequent swarms are queenless or appear queenless, which could definitely be the trigger for why my swarmed so much subsequently one after the other. It's possible those swarms I caught were virgin swarms.

So my theory is that they swarmed very early and all of the virgins failed to mate due to lack of drones, setting off the chain reaction of queen creation & swarming themselves out of business.

Washington State, west side. Amateur.

Bees are new world carnolians. First year they swarmed twice...cool! I gave one swarm away and kept the other. This year they seem to be locked in reproduction mode. I've had 5 Swarms! Ahhh!

Today after catching my fifth swarm I checked the hives and there's more Queen cells.

Because I'm an amateur I don't have a bank of drawn comb to put in between the brood. I checker boarded with pure wax foundation last month at the beginning of the month to try and prevent a swarm and I checked on them middle of the month and then now and it doesn't look like they've even touched the new frames. I have been feeding with 1:1 sugar syrup. And it seems like they've just been turning that directly into babies & queens instead of doing any kind of comb build out.

How do I snap them out of reproduction mode and into something productive?