Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
With care and an element of luck, supersedure can be induced or, rather, the bees can be
'tricked' into thinking that a virgin emerging from a queen cell placed there by you has
come from a supersedure cell and so will accept it as such.
Procedure
The following is the procedure for inducing supersedure:
Place a ripe, protected queen cell between two frames of a honey super. Make a
small entrance in the super or between the two supers.
Leave alone until the (hopefully) resulting queen can be seen laying.
Mark the new queen to distinguish her from the old one.
Now wait to see if the new queen is accepted as a supersedure queen.
As an added precaution, a queen excluder can be placed above the brood nest that
contains the queen and taken away when the new queen is laying. When the excluder is
removed, the bees and new queen can be smoked down.
Recognizing the supersedure cell
There is no easy way of distinguishing a supersedure cell from a swarm cell. There tend,
however, to be fewer supersedure cells than swarm cells. Therefore if you find only one
or two cells, these could well be supersedure cells.
The position of the queen cells may be important. Many beekeepers have reported that
queen cells built along a frame's top edge are more likely to be supersedure cells.
Once you have produced your own queens, it might be a good idea to mark them. For
various reasons (see below), queen bees are marked on the thorax. There is no evidence
