Re-introducing the queen?

[BjornBee]

I removed the open brood from my selected survivor hive, along with the queen. These frames are in a seperate hive. I grafted into queen cups, and currently have the original hive building the queen cells. I would like to re-introduce the queen back into this hive when the queen cells are ready for removal. I did not want to do a finishing hive for the queen cells and just used the strong hive.

Will there be a problem for this hive in taking back the original queen? Best way of introducing? If I take the cells strips out, and they have any other cells started from missed eggs, what would be the implications?

This hive is super strong and would it be better to leave a "raised" queen(cell) in the hive and just let the original queen in another hive?

[Michael Bush]

>Will there be a problem for this hive in taking back the original queen?

Probably not.

>Best way of introducing?

How about a newspaper combine with the hive with the old queen.

>If I take the cells strips out, and they have any other cells started from missed eggs, what would be the implications?

Hard to tell, but I'd look for them anyway.

>This hive is super strong and would it be better to leave a "raised" queen(cell) in the hive and just let the original queen in another hive?

That's probably what I'd do unless you have some reasons you don't want to.

[WineMan]

bjorn

if you are really concerned, treated her as you would with a valuable breeder and put her under a screen when you return her.

if you are just doing a few cells, you might save yourself some hassle next time by just keeping the old queen in the bottom box with an excluder and trying to raise the cells in the box above the excluder. it works pretty good often but sometimes it doesnt work so good. success seems to depend on the age of the queen, the flow or lack of, how many nurse bees and getting them to work just the cells by taking out all the open brood.

[ikeepbees]

"This hive is super strong and would it be better to leave a "raised" queen(cell) in the hive and just let the original queen in another hive?"

Bjorn, I am guessing this queen has some characteristics you like. Is there any way you could make a nuc with some of the brood from the parent colony, and introduce her there? And just leave a cell or two in the parent? I think the chances of losing her would be much less this way.

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Rob Koss

[ikeepbees]

I meant to add that you could use this nuc to requeen a weak colony with the newspaper method, or just grow it into an overwintering colony - but my main point is that I think introducing her into a small nuc has the best chance of keeping her.

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Rob Koss