Re-queening

[susbees]

Nicot large cage...sometimes bees do chew their way under or through the back. Not seen it but not used mine much yet.

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[Neils]

Ooh, Handy Thread.

I know the basic principle of re-queening, but could someone talk through their method?

i.e. You've got a queen right colony that you want to requeen, what are your basic steps/timings and at what point, when you know they've accepted the new queen, would you go through a colony and think "Yep, they're much better with this new queen than the old one"? (or not as the case may be)

[Beehive]

We successfully re-queened a couple of hives last year. We made sure our bottom hive was queenless and removed the super, leaving the brood box. We placed a sheet of newspaper on before placing the brood box with the new queen on top. We left them for a good few days and the next time we looked in the queen had moved to the bottom box and was laying well. We left them on the double deep. Not sure if we were just fortunate but if we need to re-queen this year we will do the same.

[gavin]

One of mine went queenless last summer then very hard to manage - it had always been tetchy. Uniting with a nuc via the flour method wasn't successful (I should have known) so the other spare nuc went above newspaper on a QX over the supers over a queenless brood box of very wound-up bees. Super bees are known to be more welcoming. They united peaceably after the QX was removed a week later, and another week later the nuc was moved down to the centre of the old brood box.

Excited bees in early summer can be hard to requeen. There is something to be said for doing the requeening in late summer if possible.

[Neils]

To be more specific then

I have a colony that if last year is anything to go by probably needs a super now, has a lot of chalk brood and were less than pleasant (first gen Carnie crosses I think) to deal with. Their comb is two years old so off the back of that I'm intending to shook swarm them soon(tm) to get them on new comb and give them another dose of OA but I want to replace the queen (2011 vintage) with a, hopefully, better vintage from the allotment bees.

This is hence going to be a busy 14x12 that I want to requeen from an apidea mated queen. I've taken on board the advice to give newly mated queens at least a couple of weeks to get "up to speed", so if we assume that I have a hair roller cage, an up to speed, apidea resident, mated queen and a grumpy colony that I want to put that queen into, how would people go about it?

My thinking thus far was:


1) get a newly mated queen for a couple of weeks in an apidea
2) Remove the existing queen from "grumpy colony"
3) Leave it a week, re-inspect, remove all queen cells
3a) Leave it another week?
4) Put queen (and a few attending bees?) in hair roller, plugged with nice new Ambrosia fondant.
5) Put roller in queenless hive
6) come back in a week? and see if they've accepted her

This list superseded by one below (sorry for the pun)
The timings on 1) depend on 2 & 3 in some respects. if you have an egg laying queen in an apidea is that the "go" to make the hive you want to re-queen queenless?

[gavin]

Maybe leave the Apidea new queen for three weeks so that she's completed a full cycle of brood.

A Butler cage or similar would allow you to lay the cage on the top bars which gives her extra protection from foot biting. You could cover the end with plastic until the bees look comfortable with the new queen, then take it off to expose the fondant (bakers, queen fondant a la Dave Cushman, whatever).

But I'm no expert, just the guy who made lots of mistakes last year.

[Neils]

That's where point one comes into play. if you see a decent number of eggs in the apidea(s), is that the time to make your target colony queen less? They'll want to make emergency queen cells and you obvious don't want them to make anymore so you have to leave them a week, remove the cells they've already made and now you should have a queenless colony that can't do anything about it.

Two factors now come into play (in my head)
1) You don't want a queen coming into full lay in an apidea, surely (yes, the number of bees in there and the size of the box will box constrain her laying and prevent them swarming). Frame swapping etc etc will obviously help here, but if you've got a queen bursting at the seams, is there any negative impact to keeping her in an apidea?

2) Once a colony is hopelessly queenless you've got 17 days + x time before they go drone laying workers, you took the queen out a week ago so all the brood is at least one week old, the youngest larvae has to be 4 days old give or take a few hours, so in 17 days time you have no more brood in your target colony and at that point presumably the lack of pheremone off the brood and queen will start to allow Drone Laying Workers.

[Jon]

Nellie, that list looks good to me but you don't have to wait a week after removing the queen cells. A few hours should do.
When you put the cage in, leave it closed for at least 24 hours before letting them start to eat through the fondant plug.
If they are still acting very aggressively towards the cage after 24 hours, wait another 24.

With a queen in an apidea, you need to see that brood is normal, ie no drone brood in worker cells and not too many gaps, no chalk brood.
That means you have to wait at least 9-10 days until brood is sealed. And it is better to wait another 10 days. I think I posted a link to a paper confirming this somewhere on the site.

An apidea can turn laying worker in 3 weeks but a full colony is more likely to take 5 or 6 weeks.

Paper here. Scroll down to the Rhodes and Denney para.