Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The colony accepting a new queen must be queenless.
All queen cells must be destroyed, including those made after the
colony has been made queenless.
Queens are more readily accepted by small colonies and nuclei.
In large colonies, queens are more readily accepted early or late in the
active season or during a heavy honey flow.
The bees may build queen cells or supersedure cells even after
apparently accepting the new queen. These cells must be destroyed,
and you must check that the new queen is still around.
Basically, there is no method that offers a 100% guarantee of queen acceptance, but the
methods outlined above are well tried and tested and invariably work. Remember, with
the above methods you can substitute a queen cell, either purchased by you or made by
your bees. Or you can even purchase small, plastic queen cells into which you can put
a virgin queen. A thin film of plastic is placed over the exit hole, and the cell is placed
on a frame of brood hanging downwards. I have never tried this but have heard from
others that it works.
There will be other occasions when you will need to re-queen a colony (for example,
when you find a failed or dead queen or a colony in which the queen has disappeared).
You can employ these two methods just as easily for these circumstances.
Many beekeepers are very nice people who don't like to kill a queen. I'm afraid I'm a bit
like that so, if she is a one-year-old, you can place her in a nuc and grow the nuc into a
colony, but you need to take combs from your other colonies to make up the nucs, and
that may not be in your management/harvest plans. Also, this will effectively double
your stock-holding which you may not want (or have sufficient boxes/frames/lids, etc.),
and half your stock will be new queens and half one-year-olds. This may make things
difficult for you, so it really is best to kill the old queen. As one commercial beekeeper
told me: 'A queen is just a production unit. Nothing more.'
