Thoughts and Techniques for requeening this time of year

[winevines]

Would like to hear from folks

1) the pros and cons of requeening this time of year and
2) the best methods to use for requeening this time of year (i.e., push
in cage, put queen in nuc with brood, etc. etc)

Note this in the Mid Atlantic Region and there is no honey flow

Thanks for any advise

[Ravenseye]

Lot's of beeks re-queen about now. I'm doing one myself. The pros are that you should end up with a young, producing queen going into the winter. If the hive is healthy when you re-queen, then she is ready to rock and roll in the spring. You have less to worry about regarding an aging or spotty queen that fails exactly when you want her to be giving you lots and lots of spring bees. Some beeks feel that a young queen may help slow down swarming although I've never experienced that. Re-queening in the fall may also give you a break in the brood cycle earlier than normal in the fall if the new queen takes a while to get going. That can give you a drop in mite counts earlier than you would typically get. Finally, if your old queen is slowing down, but the temps are still good for laying, then the new queen might pump up fall production of brood giving you more bees to cluster for the winter. You can see that a lot depends on your colony. Of course, if you're just switching from one type of bee to another, fall re-queening lets you go into the winter with, say, Italians and start the spring with, perhaps, Carniolans.

There are some cons. What if your old queen is just....old. Replacing her with a store bought queen might give you a poor queen at a time of the year when you may not get another chance to re-queen. The girls might not accept the new queen. You might cause damage when you handle her. Worse, you may not know if she's a good one until the spring, when things should be booming. These are all risks, but managable ones.

The best method for re-queening is kind of up to you. Nothing in your post is wrong. If you can find your old queen and pinch her...leave the hive queenless for a bit....and then introduce your caged queen, you can easily check to see how they're reacting to her in a few days. I would lean towards push in but again, be careful about the handling issue. In fact, you may just want to bank your old queen as a precaution until your new queen has been accepted. As far as the honey flow goes, you can feed if you want. Some beeks feel that feeding when introducing a new queen makes the bees like the queen that seemed to have brought them food all of a sudden. I don't know about that but feeding probably won't hurt.

One last thought. If you have a weak queen that has caused a weak hive along with a strong queen in a strong hive, you may want to consider pinching your bad queen and combining for the winter. Come early spring, get yourself a store bought queen and do a split. That might help protect all your bees, cut down the spring swarming tendency, still give you a nice, new queen for the spring and probably not really affect your ability to gather honey.

Just my thoughts.....

[danno1800]

I did it right before the Fall flow started. I fed them whicle they were releasing her. It went just fine and all are laying fat bee babies to go into the Winter. I did this last year and in the Spring they were my best hives this year.
One tip for you: don't kill to old queen. Put her in a queen cage, set up a small queenless nuc and use it as a queen bank until you are sure your new queens are accepted and laying well. You can always put one back if the requeening doesn't go to your satisfaction.
You can also make a queen bank above a queen excluder in a queenright hive. If all goes well, you can always get rid of them then.
Good luck and I hope this helps!

[winevines]

Sounds like there is no real difference between requeening now or any other time of year, but since queens are harder to come by, banking the old queen to be sure the new one takes sounds like a good idea

THANKS

[tct1w]

First year beek and tried to requeen unsuccessfully. Just took the old queen out and put in a queen cage and four days later she had been released. She wasn't accepted. Opened the hive up today and there were six capped queen cells. Hopefully they will hatch soon and the new queen will still have time to get properly mated. Hope theres still enough drones around. Next time I will use an introduction cage and keep the old queen around. I'm learning. Take care Dave

[Dr.Wax]

Advantages include: 1) Easier to order a queen this time of year when demand is lower. 2) More available drones in fall mean better chance of having a well-mated and thus superior queen.

[Joseph Clemens]

This time of year my technique is to have the new queen laying in a five-frame Nuc, then to remove five frames from the receiving colony (which has already been queenless for at least 24 hours) and insert the five frames of the Nuc, including the new queen, who is busy laying. I smoke the receiving colony real good, but not the Nuc, then slip the frames into place and quickly close up. It has worked for three out of three hives, so far this past few weeks, with a few more to go. With Nucs I just introduce one of my cultured queen cells, then keep an eye on them to ensure a desirable virgin emerges and then mates successfully. It amazes me how often the virgins simply disappear before they become mated and laying queens. But I've even had several new mated and laying queens go missing.