Queen Introduction
Denrosa Apiaries Queen Introduction
Introducing purchased queens is a process that requires some experience and skill, and following steps that lead to a successful outcome are essential. If you’re very experienced with introducing purchased queens and have a consistent record of success, this section probably isn’t aimed at you. It’s a selection of general conditions that should be considered and followed to ensure a successful introduction.
The best results come from smaller units, so nucs generally give the best success. For increase, we would always recommend nucleus units over other formats. However, perfectly good results can be had with normal-sized splits or colonies. Once you’ve ordered your queens and agreed on the sending schedule, you must make the appropriate preparations.
Seven to nine days before the queens are due to arrive, you should make up your splits or nuclei, or ensure the recipient colony is queenless.
Just before your queens are due, start trickle-feeding your recipient colonies. A litre every couple of days is fine to simulate the onset of a honey flow, which makes the bees much more content and receptive.
When your queens arrive, unpack them, give them a few drops of water onto the mesh part of the cage, and check they still have enough candy remaining (they should). Don’t panic about using them immediately—they’ll be fine for a couple of days as long as you keep them fairly cool and out of direct sunlight.
Go to the recipient colony and examine it thoroughly, destroying all queen cells. You must be very vigilant, as some may still be in the earliest stages. If the queen larva was freshly laid as an egg on the day of splitting, it might just look like an enlarged worker cell with extra royal jelly. If you’re not 100% confident, check through twice.
At this point, there are two methods. We prefer the press-in cage for somewhat superior results, but most use the shipping cage and do perfectly well. For the purpose of this guide, we’ll describe the shipping cage method, but we’ve also included the press-in cage method below.
Shipping Cage Method
Check the queen and attendant workers are fine. Assuming they are, remove the candy tab (the little plastic section on the end of the cage that allows the hive bees access to the candy). Place the cage carefully between the top bars, in the centre of the brood nest. Replace the feeder and give the colony a proper, sizeable feed of sugar syrup at this time. Then put the colony back together and go away.
Do not open the hive to check on things in less than five days, and preferably seven. Every day early that you go in to check increases the failure rate.
Check after 5–7 days, and in the vast majority of cases, the new queen will be out, running, and in full lay. If there’s no nectar flow, continue the trickle feed for another week or so. You should expect a 90–95% acceptance rate with this method.
Press-In Cage Method
The press-in cage method follows the same steps up to the point of introduction. If your cage is new, assemble it by fitting the four corner posts (these are important when you reassemble the colony, as they hold the cage in place). Fill the candy tube with fondant, candy, or even marshmallow. Remove the small white tongue at the end of the candy tube, as it will prevent access to the candy otherwise.
Select a comb of sealed brood that’s hatching. Brush all bees off the comb and press the cage into the brood so it has NO bees but does have hatching brood under the cage. Then place the queen—and only the queen—into the press-in cage through the small plug hole on top. Wait to see her walk away, then push the plug firmly into the hole. Reassemble the colony and follow the same timescales as the shipping cage method, including the feeding regime.
The reason for having no bees under the cage with the queen is that when the brood hatches, the new bees immediately adopt her as their queen and become her entourage. She’ll start laying in the cage before the bees release her, so she’ll already be an ‘in-lay’ queen before mingling with the rest of the hive.
Transferring the Queen into the Press-In Cage
How do you get only the queen for placing in the cage? There are many ways, but the method we use might seem a bit rough—it works very well though, and causes no harm.
Take the shipping cage intact and place it in a mug of cool or cold water. Swish it around a bit and leave it for a couple of minutes. The bees will become pretty cold and wet, and slow right down. They won’t be able to fly. Open the queen cage, pick up the queen by her soaked wings, and run her into the press-in cage. Replace the plug, and everything else follows the same steps as the shipping cage method. The chilling does no harm at all—in a few minutes, the queen will be running around as if nothing had happened.
After the first week has passed, check for laying and remove the queen cage. The queen should be motoring along very nicely. The press-in cage can be reused many times, and this method raises the success rate to around 98%.
Varroa Treatment
If you’re treating for Varroa, you should discontinue treatment during the queen introduction process, as it increases rejection rates. You can resume treatment after the queen is accepted.
Supercedure Attempts
If the recipient bees and the introduced bees are genetically very different, you may see some attempts at supercedure. Just knock down these cells, and in most cases, the attempts will stop, and the introduced queen will take over without further problems.
Help! My Bees Are Queenless!
We get this question a lot, especially late in the season. Our response is always: are you sure?
If the bees aren’t truly queenless (for example, if they have a virgin queen or if she’s gone into autumn mode and simply stopped laying), they will kill your new and expensive queen, and Jolanta will be upset at the thought of her carefully raised queens being sent to their deaths.
We always ask you to make sure your bees are queenless before buying a replacement queen. The easiest way to do this is to use a test frame containing some eggs and young larvae from another colony. Place it in the centre of the nest area of the ‘queenless’ colony and check back in a few days. If the bees are trying to draw emergency cells on the donated brood, then yes, your hive is 99% likely to be queenless. You can remove that brood frame, put it back where it came from (after destroying the cells), or just keep it in the colony—but you need to be ultra-careful not to leave any early-stage cells. Removing the comb is safest. Then introduce your queen using the shipping cage method described above.
If your bees don’t attempt to draw queen cells, there’s a very high likelihood they have a queen—probably a virgin that isn’t mated yet, or maybe she has some physical issue that means she’ll never lay. If you’re attempting to introduce a queen to this colony, you must find the queen and remove her. Virgins can be quite difficult to spot for the inexperienced eye, but you have to persist—if you don’t, your new queen will die. Once you find and remove her, introduction is similar to the methods described above.
From June to September, we normally have a small extra stock of queens (beyond what’s on the website) to help in these kinds of emergencies.
Sometimes the Best Option Isn’t Buying a Queen
Always remember: queen introduction is more successful under steady feeding than without feeding.
That said, sometimes the correct course of action isn’t for us to take your money and send you a queen. If your colony is queenless, or a drone layer, and by late August or early September it has declined to five bars of bees or less (most of which will be old and unlikely to survive the winter), the soundest advice is to write that colony off and split another once it’s expanding quickly in the spring. An expensive queen introduced into a non-viable unit won’t save your colony. Sometimes the tough decision needs to be made—either shake the colony out (especially if it’s a drone layer) or unite it with a normal colony, with a view to splitting in spring and buying a queen then. This can often be the wisest course of action.