easiest way to introduce a queen?

[Sasha]

What would be the easiest way to do this?I mean it is not simple to find a queen in a ten 3 box langstroth hives.How are bigger commercial type beekeepers doing this?
What would happen if I just release the queen into the hive?Hypothetically ,if a young queen and a three year old queen met in the hive would the younger queen be victorius?
What would be the least effort method?

[Curtis]

Call a beek friend and let them do it.
Curtis

[Sasha]

Yeah,OK,thanks a lot.
[img]smile.gif[/img]

[Michael Bush]

>What would be the easiest way to do this?

Just do it. Practice helps.

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesqueenspotting.htm

>I mean it is not simple to find a queen in a ten 3 box langstroth hives.How are bigger commercial type beekeepers doing this?

I don't know about that.

>What would happen if I just release the queen into the hive?

The workers will instantly ball her and she will be dead about 24 hours or so later.

>Hypothetically ,if a young queen and a three year old queen met in the hive would the younger queen be victorius?

Hypothetically, if the wokers hadn't killed her (which they almost certainly will) from my experience, two laying queens would ignore each other.

>What would be the least effort method?

I would find the old queen and remove her. If you really can't find a queen, you could really work at finding three frames of brood that don't have a queen on them and put them in a nuc and introduce the queen to the nuc. Then you could do a combine. They still may kill your new queen or they may accept both. usually by fall the older queen will disappear.

There are ways to narrow down what box the queen is in. Such as putting a queen excluder between each box and comb back in four days and look for eggs. You can also use the method for requeening a hot hive, even if they aren't just to narrow down where she is.

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesrequeeninghot.htm

[John Gesner]

I installed 10 new queens in May this year. 8 of the ten were released and are doing fine. Two didn't make it out of their cages. Pretty good percentage from what I've read. Here's what I did:

First, find the old queen and kill her. In my hives, I've got two deeps for brood. I split and separated the two boxes, leaving the inner cover on one of them to keep the bees calmer while I worked the other. Take two frames out of the middle and look for the queen. If the frames are full of capped brood, she might be in the other box. If you find eggs or young larva, keep looking. Check half the box at a time till you find her and kill her. The two frames out of the middle give enough space to isolate the two halves, but the queen can still get from one side to the other (or sometimes onto the ground/bottom board).

Take your new queen, in a cage, remove the cork, push a small nail thru the candy (careful) then press the cage into the middle of a frame with brood and larva. Candy up. Screen side perpendicular to the frame, not pressed into the frame. Put the frames back in the box with the queen in the middle. Make a mark on top of the frame where her cage is for future reference. Make a mark on the outside of the brood box where she is for future reference. Put your hive back together and leave them alone for 4 to 5 days. Come back, find the cage to make sure she's out, and remove it.

Disclaimer: This was the first time I've re-queened. I read alot and talked to other beeks. Give yourself about 45 minutes to an hour per hive to accomplish this. Pick a day when you feel lucky. Take your time.

[Dwight]

I'd have to be really be feeling lucky! I am legally blind in one eye and I wear trifocals, as you can imagine I don't find many queens in strong hives. I use the mini nuc method MB describes when I requeen and hope the best queen wins!!

[Joel]

We put in 350 queens this spring. Here's a few tecniques we use.

1) We always requeen after the field bees are out foraging. This eliminates the stacked bees on frames and increasing our chances by reducing the numbers to look at.

2) Smoke the entrance very lightly and just a puff under the lid, use your best gentle handling methods to mimize alarm and running behavior. Your goal here is to keep the queen laying and not running.

3) Find the area with open combs or combs with eggs. A laying queen is looking for the next empty cell to deposit eggs. Start there.
4) Before pulling a frame look down along it and at the face of the next frame. A queen really bounces when she walks as opposed to workers or drones. Once you see her that way the 1st. time she will really stand out in the future.

5) As we pull frames we check the edges 1st so we don't miss her running over to the other side then we inspect looking for a disruption. The bees turn toward the queen as she moves causing a kind of "Owl's eye" around her.

6) Sometimes none of this works and we'll put the new queen cage in and close up the hive for a few (15) minutes. Often the new queen will come to the frame with the queen cage to investigate.

If worse comes to worse you can shake all the bees off the frames through a queen exluder (smoke them down) into an empty hive box and of course just the drones and queen are left. I pinch the old queen ( and alway feel terrible afterwards)and pitch her away from the hive before adding a queen cage. We do our runs so the hive is queenless for an hour or so before adding the new caged queen.

Dwight, I got bifocals 2 years ago and it has made it much more difficult to find queens. I just started wearing glasses and if it's not the shift from one focus to another it's sweat, fog or something else on them. I empathize.

[beecron]

After dispatching the queen, consider using the push-in cage method for introducing the new queen.

Cut a piece of aluminum window screen into a square approx 5" x 5". Cut out about a 1/2" x 1/2" square from each corner so that you can bend the remaining four sides down at a 90 degree angle creating a square 4" x 4" cage, open fully on one side.

When you are ready to install the new queen, take a frame that contains capped brood which is close to emerging and shake or brush every last bee from it. Take a few steps from the hive so that you can do the next steps without the workers interfering. You don't want any of the workers getting near the new queen during the next step.

Carefully open the queen cage to release the queen and her attendants onto the comb over some of the capped brood. Your goal is to get her and her attendants onto the capped brood and under the cage you made. When that is done, gently push the cage to seat it into the comb, leaving room for them to roam under the cage.

Her attendants obviously have already accepted her and the emerging brood will accept her because they know no other. Keeping her caged away from the others will prevent them from balling her and she will (in my opinion) be much more easily accepted by the hive. They will feed her through the screen. Return the frame to the hive and close it up, leaving it alone for about a week as you normally would. After a week, you can open the hive and pull out the screen releasing the queen to go on about her business.

Although I have had good luck with acceptance with the standard queen cage introduction, I have had better luck with push-in cages.

Good luck if you decide to try this.

[Sasha]

Thanks guys
Part of the problem has solved itself.Sort of Murphys law in action.I have made splits from hives and in few of them I have removed queens together with open brood for the nucs.Despite my best eforts to locate queens to not leave the hive queenless. [img]smile.gif[/img]
Seems that this bee business is kind of complicated.

[Aspera]

Hey Sasha, what part of Serbia are you from? Many of my neighbors are Serbian. I've been fortunate enough to taste some delicious Serbian forest honey and plum brandy that they have brought back with them. I've also heard that Serbia and Macedonia have some pretty unique races of bees.

I think the easiest way to requeen is to introduce a queen cell, but this has the obvious disadvantage that she'll mate with whatever mongrel drone she finds.