Requeeing a hive

[Caroga Bee]

I found that one of my hives is Queenless. The hive was a package that started this year. After a checking it was clear that the queen had left or was killed by the package at some point. Yesterday I picked up a new queen from a Beek who runs about 2500 hives. He told me to at the time of requeening to put in a frame of brood too from another hive ( no brood in the queenless hive) as this will help the new queen to be accepted into the hive. This Beek states he has seen many a time that a hive will kill the new queen if they have been without a queen for a while.

Has anyone heard of this before?

[katmike]

If they have been queenless long enough, they can create a laying worker which would be the worst case scenario. These are the more difficult situations to remedy. If they already have a laying worker, they would probably kill a new queen since they would already consider themselves queenright.

Even so, if they haven't developed a laying worker, I wouldn't just throw a new queen in without confining her to a queen cage for a few days.

[Caroga Bee]

Looking at the frames it does not appear that anyone is laying anything

[Ben Brewcat]

Katmike has it right; laying workers would be the biggest concern. How long have they been queenless? Is there any more mature brood (capped brood)? The other risk would be that they superceded her and you have a virgin queen who hasn't started laying yet but they've torn down the queen cells.

I'd just introduce her after feeding light syrup for a day unless you have a good flow on. And do use a queen cage or push-in cage or something.

[Michael Bush]

>Has anyone heard of this before?

Yes. The open brood pheromone will greatly improve acceptance in my experience.

[Caroga Bee]

No brood cells capped or otherwise, looked for large amount of drone cells , did not see many.The hive could not have had a Queen for about 2 weeks maybe a little longer. Now queen in a cage, 9 frames and brood frame introduced from another hive.
While doing my inspection on the day that I noticed no queen in the hive ,it was like nothing was going on and the girls had nothing to do....Just "hanging out", waiting for them to be told what to do.