Jon

Releasing the Queen

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I released the queen I had left in a roller cage overnight.
The two colonies seemed to combine without fighting.
In theory, a queenless colony should look on an introduced queen as a gift from above but you never know with bees.
I removed the roller cage and then a frame from the nuc.
I placed the frame on its side and set the roller cage onto it, releasing the plug.
You can see the queen leaving and the bees immediately starting to groom her.
Sometimes when you do this, the bees will start to ball her and you have to move quickly to get her back in a cage away from her potential assassins.
I wouldn't try and mark a queen at a time like this as the smell of the paint could make the difference between being accepted or not.
I will leave this colony at least 10 days before checking for brood,

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In the second photograph, you can see the bees trying to communicate with the queen inside the roller cage. This is a good sign. When they want to kill her, there is a ball of bees all around the roller.

I like the look of this queen as she is nice and dark. She is a sister of number 33 in the blog entry on wing Morphometry.

This was the last queen I reared in 2009. She hatched at the end of August and started laying on 12th September. I added a little brood but the colony did not really have time to build up before winter.

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Updated 21-03-2010 at 08:26 PM by Jon

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Comments

  1. Calum's Avatar
    Hi Jon,
    nice pictures, and a good explanation, how did you keep the queeen over the winter?
    In her undersized colony on top of a stonger one with an excluder inbetween or in a nuc?
    ttfn
    Calum
  2. Jon's Avatar
    She was in a very well insulated 5 frame nuc on a shelf in a garden shed. It went into the winter with two frames of bees. The nuc was just a correx box but I taped 25mm of polystyrene on all sides and had 50mm on the roof. It would have been better overwintering in a smaller space.