[Cliffton Leverett]

Ok, so I made a split on March 1st from a strong hive to head of swarming. Now I can't get queens that early so I did a walk away split. She started laying at the beginning of April. I've been supplementing with frames of brood from another hive. I had about 4 frames of brood. The problem is I am in a large Africanized Honey bee area. Since this queen was open mated I found her on the 19th then gave her the hive tool test and placed a new queen in a cage. I pulled the cork and placed in between two frames. I opened that Hive today (23rd) and the cage was empty and I couldn't find her..but I did find several cups that had royal jelly and larvae. Will the queen that I placed into the hive 4 days ago cause those cells to be torn down? do I need to verify my queen is there and tear all the cups down?

 

[standman]

Cliffton, if I understand your situation correctly, these larvae must be from the original queen, so they would carry any AHB genetics, and would also open-mate with drones that are likely Africanized. If you are trying to avoid AHB, I would say the answer to your final question is "yes".

As to whether the new queen will cause the qc's to be destroyed, I think it is a toss-up. I would probably wait about a week, giving the new girl some time to settle and begin laying. If you find eggs, she is good to go. And then you can deal with with queen cells.

 

[Cliffton Leverett]

Cliffton, if I understand your situation correctly, these larvae must be from the original queen, so they would carry any AHB genetics, and would also open-mate with drones that are likely Africanized.

That is correct the queen that I dispatched had eggs and larvae that were present The Emergency queen cells (they were on the face of the comb) would be from her.

Ok I'm in a wait and see point? I have to return to the out yard in a few days to remove the queen cage from a package I just hived today (23rd). I guess I will do an inspection on the 25th I have to show up again to fill feeders and deposit bees from a cut out scheduled on Friday.

 

[Joseph Clemens]

I had been intentionally keeping AHBs for about the first decade after I relocated to where I am now. During that ten years, I attempted to requeen them, several times, using normal requeening protocol's for EHB colonies. It never took.

I was finally successful at requeening my AHB colonies, by creating queenless nucleus colonies, made up with only sealed brood and nurse bees. The new EHB queens were accepted by these nucs, I introduced them with push-in wire cages, this confined the new queens in areas without adult bees, where worker brood was in the process of emerging. The newly emerged worker bees, accepted these new queens as their own, afterwards I simply moved them into a full-size hive, and moved the remaining frames from their parent colonies to the new hives, but was careful to leave all the older forager age bees, back at their original locations. I was able to requeen the orphan field bees and create new colonies, by giving them only eggs from the new queens. They raised themselves EHB queens (some of which may have mated with AHB drones), but despite that complication, I gained one more colony in this process, for each colony requeened.