New Colonsay queens! - MiniPlus now, or direct introduce (hopefully) tomorrow?

Exciting day! A week later than expected, but still hugely welcome, I've received two Amm queens from Colonsay. (They've only been in the post since this Monday - delay was at the Colonsay end.)
With perfect comic timing, as the postie walked up the path with them, the rain started. Due to continue all day, heavily. I swithered about for a bit hoping it'd ease, but it remained cool & wet.
Preparations for the new queens had gone a little haywire due to the extra week's wait. One queen has a little queenless intro nuc ready & waiting, as planned, just two frames, ready to be reunited to its parent colony once the Colonsay queen is settled & laying. By some miracle they've kept themselves warm & fended off the wasps.
But the other intro nuc had to be rescued. I'm now hoping to directly introduce the second Colonsay queen to a strong colony which is on brood & a half, but the weather today just wasn't good enough to go through it searching for a queen. Forecast tomorrow is vaguely hopeful, but not great.
Meanwhile I've just removed a drone layer from a quite full & very frustrated MiniPlus (RIP Aai: emerged 2013, headed lots of adventures...). Would I be better to introduce the 2nd Colonsay queen to the MP tonight, let her settle, & then introduce her to the big colony in maybe a week or so, picking a really good day for weather, or should I hang on till tomorrow & hope for a chance to de-queen the large host colony then?
I don't whether it's bad for a queen to be swapped from colony to colony twice, in such a short time, & I don't know how much an extra day in a cage would diminish her chances with the big, confident currently queenright colony. I'm hoping for advice from people with more experience with queens!
I'd kind of like to go for the MP option because (a) they are so desperate for a functioning queen and (b) I could do with getting some work done this week..... But I want to give both Colonsay queens the very best chance I can.

Considering my disastrous week, and that my experience of introducing queens is still limited, I'm not in a good position to give advice - but I think my cautious choice would be the MiniPlus. It's probably too late for tonight, but tomorrow will do as well. I hope others will reply soon.

Good luck with both queens, Emma.

Kitta

I'd split off a 3-4 frame nuc from your strong colony, let it settle, and put the Colonsay queen in her cage in there.

G.

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Originally Posted by Mellifera Crofter

Considering my disastrous week, and that my experience of introducing queens is still limited, I'm not in a good position to give advice - but I think my cautious choice would be the MiniPlus. It's probably too late for tonight, but tomorrow will do as well. I hope others will reply soon.

Good luck with both queens, Emma.

Kitta

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I'm so tempted re: MiniPlus. So simple, with more rain forecast... especially as the MiniPlus is inside a shed!

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Originally Posted by gavin

I'd split off a 3-4 frame nuc from your strong colony, let it settle, and put the Colonsay queen in her cage in there.

G.

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"let it settle" - e.g. till the evening, then slip her inside then? (I'd be keeping them shut in till evening, as I had a couple of queen-in-Paynes nucs earlier in the season that mostly abandoned their brood & queen.)

Alternatively - if I gave her to the MiniPlus now, then united that with the stronger colony, might that work almost as well? Not sure where the bees originally came from - it was a cast which landed in the hut porch - but they look & behave like mine, albeit with a few yellow abdomens, & they turned up when I was half expecting a cast, so they should be quite related to the strong colony. Forecast is 10% probability of rain, all through tomorrow...

Gavin is probably right that made up nuc is safest
Anything with adult bees in it is more risky


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Originally Posted by The Drone Ranger

Gavin is probably right that made up nuc is safest
Anything with adult bees in it is more risky

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Oops. The nuc I introduced one queen to this eve was made up on 27 July, so that's got some quite old bees by now. A week makes such a difference.

As soon as I put her in the bees were completely surrounding the cage, but all of them were just licking and licking and licking. Licking the cage itself, or licking through into the cage if they could. Is that a good sign...?

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Originally Posted by Emma

As soon as I put her in the bees were completely surrounding the cage, but all of them were just licking and licking and licking. Licking the cage itself, or licking through into the cage if they could.
Is that a good sign...?

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yes!

Will help immensely to feed the receiving colony too. Also, it does no harm to leave the cage locked for a few days once in the hive before allowing the bees to release the queen -as I've said before, if they don't want to look after her in the cage they'll soon supercede her once she's released (if she gets that far).

There's a nice trick buried in the following video, and yes it is practical and does work although in your present circumstances it would be better used to determine whether to allow release by the bees rather than doing so manually:

https://youtu.be/Yg92q9hPIv8

I suppose that the ideal situations for getting queens accepted are:

- a queenless stock of young bees (can be recently queenless and still with the means to make a replacement)
- a long-queenless stock that knows it is unable to make another one
- introduction into a smaller stock rather than a large one, especially one of dubious temper

... and that the subsequent uniting with a larger stock goes better if:

- the new queen has already established a brood nest
- the new queen is surrounded by nurse bees that have accepted her
- the nuc was originally created from the stock to which it is being returned
- there isn't a big disturbance around the time the queen meets new workers, and afterwards for a while

So your MiniPlus and a newly created nuc should work but for slightly different reasons. The uniting of the MiniPlus with the larger stock is one thing that might prove a little tricky. If you place it over newspaper on top of the bigger colony the MP frames are quite likely to continue to be used for brood or honey.

Letting a newly created nuc settle for a while is to bleed fliers (older workers) back home and to let the stock come to terms with its newly queenless state. You need to have enough young bees in it to start with, and I reckon an hour is about the right time to let it settle without wholesale loss of bees back home. For the same reason I would not block in the nucleus immediately it is made up.

Murray's preference of a large introduction cage into a big colony sorts many of these issues and requires fewer visits, except, of course, the 'big colony not long queenless' issue. Seems to work for him though.

I don't think I'm that experienced on this (though I've made most of the mistakes) and constructive criticism would be good .....

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Originally Posted by gavin

So your MiniPlus and a newly created nuc should work but for slightly different reasons. The uniting of the MiniPlus with the larger stock is one thing that might prove a little tricky. If you place it over newspaper on top of the bigger colony the MP frames are quite likely to continue to be used for brood or honey.

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Probably too late in the far north(!) but down here where we're still deep into the most protracted main-flow i've ever known I'd be tempted to go down that route and then split the mp off and add another queen to that in the hope of overwintering it. But we've got plenty of time left here -if anything it's the first 5 or 6 months of the year that cause us issues :)

As for the push in cages that you mention, they've surely got to be the closest thing to bombproof introduction there is.