Odds/chances/percentages...you pick!

[BjornBee]

Some things are pretty much a given. Like placing a queen into a laying worker colony. Almost always it results in a dead queen.

I played around last year with caging newly emerged queens in cages and introducing them into nucs then releasing them 24 hours later. I had a take somewhere around 70%, although I'm not sure the damage that the queen could have taken from being confined for her first 24 hours made for that amount of loss.

So I have some questions along those same lines.

1) Knowing a laying worker colony will kill an introduced queen, what about queen cells? Would they kill them just the same? It seems that some laying hives do in fact realize they need a queen as they are attempting to raise a queen cell along side all the drone cells.

So If I had 10 laying worker hives, and introduced queen cells into them, what percentage of queen would emerge and correct the situation? I have never done this, but it seems like a question directed to me from time to time.

2) I have in the past, "Run in the queen" to a queenless nuc, and had them take. These were nucs I pulled the queen one day, then introduced a newly emerged virgin queen by smoking the crap out of the hive, then letting her walk in the front entrance. Was this just lucky as I did this just a couple times? Or is there some success in this? If I did this for ten hives, what rate of success do you think would happen?

Thank you.

[BjornBee]

Well, I just used up 5 queens that had been opened after being placed in a hair curl roller cage. They were what was left from yesterdays queen cell pulls. (One queen came out this morning and I could not find her. And I had to leave for a nuc order.) So the nucs that had their queens pulled this morning, just got blasted with a good smoking, and I directly released the queens into the nucs. All five walked around unnoticed, and seems fine. The other bees seemed to not care a bit that a virgin queen was among them.

Now if I could find a way to get this result with a few laying worker colonies... ;)

[peggjam]

"Now if I could find a way to get this result with a few laying worker colonies..."

You might if you feed in a few frames of open brood a week or two pior to putting in the virgins:).

[Chef Isaac]

I wonder if you put a frame of brood in a laying worker hive and then place the queen cell in there what would happen.

I have these same questions a lot of the time. Just not the time to try them out.

[Michael Bush]

>1) Knowing a laying worker colony will kill an introduced queen, what about queen cells? Would they kill them just the same? It seems that some laying hives do in fact realize they need a queen as they are attempting to raise a queen cell along side all the drone cells.

I've had fairly good luck with queen cells in laying worker hives. Better if I put cell protectors on them.

>So If I had 10 laying worker hives, and introduced queen cells into them, what percentage of queen would emerge and correct the situation? I have never done this, but it seems like a question directed to me from time to time.

More than half.

>2) I have in the past, "Run in the queen" to a queenless nuc, and had them take. These were nucs I pulled the queen one day, then introduced a newly emerged virgin queen by smoking the crap out of the hive, then letting her walk in the front entrance. Was this just lucky as I did this just a couple times? Or is there some success in this? If I did this for ten hives, what rate of success do you think would happen?

I haven't had as good a result as I'd like. A little more than 50%. Dee Lusby says the secret is to have them emerge in the incubator and never been in contact with a worker before you run them in. I have not had the opportunity to test that theory.