Question for you all. When you requeen a colony with a queen cell, do you all remove the old queen? How do you all do it? Not that I'm lazy but I really don't like looking for queens. It's funny cause I'm going to be raising my own queens next year. That never seems to be the point of my inspections. Happy to see eggs... Just need to know if you all just put a queen cell in the hive and call it good.
Thanks
If you think about it, if you didn't deal with the existing queen, she might kill your new queen, and what have you gained? Until you can confidently breed, or buy, queens that are certified ninjas, you're probably better off executing the old queen, yourself, instead of leaving it to your virgin brawler.
you should do some more work studying splits......unless you are going to start queen rearing by moving eggs yourself. since it doesn't sound like that you should realize if there is a queen and they are not about to swarm they won't make queen cells. you have to take a frame with eggs and put it into a nuc by itself and they will make them. or do a 50 /50 split and you'll get some.
I know there is still a lot of time and reading to be done on my side. I have read where some just put a queen cell in a split and the colony will suppercede the old queen when the new er young queen comes back from her mating flight. I am planning on raising some queens next year. Will order some grafting tools this winter. I'm not sure if it was Michael Bush or fat bee man or Mr Palmer that mentioned that commercial guys just put the cells in the split and don't bother looking for the old queen. I may look for her if for no other reason then to just have her in a glass of alcohol to make swarm lure.
Isn't Palmer or whoever talking about when you split a hive into 6 or so nucs. 5 will end up with new queens and the one that the old queen ended up in will destroy the queen cell. The point being that one wasted queen cell is not worth the time and trouble of searching a large hive for the queen. If a hive has a healthy queen they will almost always tear down the queen cell(unless it is far away from the broodnest).
Just consider, if you have 100 hives, & one fails, its not that big of a deal.
If you have one hive, & one fails, it is 100%
roll the dice & take your chances, or go with the tedious "sure thing".
either choice, good luck ! ... CE
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