How to requeen a beehive

A bad queen can wreck your season. She might be old, failing, laying a patchy pattern, or heading up a colony that stings you every time you lift the lid. Requeening is the fix. Swap her for a calm, well-bred queen and the whole colony changes character within a few weeks.

It sounds daunting, but it really comes down to two things. Control and patience. Get those right and this is one of the most reliable jobs in beekeeping. Rush it and you’ll lose the queen you paid for.

This is the exact method we use here at Black Mountain Honey. Watch the full walkthrough below, then follow the step-by-step underneath.

What you’ll need

• A caged, mated queen from a supplier you trust
• Your hive tool and smoker
• A light feed, or a light nectar flow during the introduction, so get your feeder and syrup ready

That’s it. Nothing fancy.

The timeline at a glance

Requeening isn’t hard, but the timing matters more than anything else. Here’s the whole process before we break it down.

• Day 0. Find and remove the old queen.
• Day 8. Knock down every emergency queen cell and make the colony hopelessly queenless.
• Day 9. Tuck the sealed queen cage between the brood frames and leave it alone.
• Day 10. Open the fondant tab to start the slow release.
• Day 17. Check for a laying queen.

The waiting is the part most people get wrong. Don’t cut corners on it.

Step 1. Remove the old queen (day 0)

Go into the colony, find the old queen, and dispatch her. I know it’s horrible. Nobody enjoys it. But the rule is simple. You cannot requeen properly while the old queen is still alive, so take your time, find her, and remove her. Once she’s gone, close the hive up. You’re done for the day.

Step 2. Wait eight full days

This is where people slip up. You wait eight full days. Not five, not six, not “about a week”. Eight. Over that time the colony realises it’s queenless and starts building emergency queen cells across the brood frames.

Step 3. Make the colony hopelessly queenless (day 8)

On day eight, go back in and inspect the brood nest. You’ll see emergency cells dotted across the frames. That’s the bees trying to raise their own queen, and it can look a bit like swarming, but it isn’t. If you leave those cells, virgin queens will emerge and you lose control of the whole thing.

So we make the colony hopelessly queenless. That means no queen, no virgin, and no way to raise one.

Here’s how. Go through every brood frame, shake all the bees off, and remove every single emergency cell you can find. Don’t just glance over a frame covered in bees. Shake them off so you can see clearly, because one missed cell and a hatching virgin undoes all your work. Once you’ve done the whole brood nest, the colony has no queen and no resources to make one. That’s exactly the state we want, because now they’re primed to accept the queen you give them.

Step 4. Introduce the caged queen, sealed (day 9)

Wait 24 hours after knocking the cells down. Then place the caged queen directly between two brood frames in the middle of the hive. Do nothing to the cage. Don’t open it, don’t pop any tabs, don’t touch the fondant. All you’re doing is letting the colony get used to her pheromone. Close the hive back up.

Step 5. Open the fondant for a slow release (day 10)

Another 24 hours later, take the cage out. Pop the plastic tab at the bottom to expose the fondant, and that’s all. Do not open the cage, slide the plastic out, or let the queen walk free. The only way she should get out is by the bees eating through the fondant over the next few days. That slow release is what gets her accepted. Put the cage back between the frames and close up.

Step 6. Leave them alone for seven days

This is the hard part. Patience. If there’s a good flow on, leave them to it. If there isn’t, set the hive up so you can get some one-to-one sugar syrup in, which helps the colony settle and improves acceptance.

The feed matters less than this next bit. Do nothing for seven days. Going in early is how you kill the queen. Even a perfect introduction gets ruined when you open up after two or three days for a look. The bees ball her and she’s gone. It’s not nice to see, especially when it’s your own doing.

Step 7. Check for a laying queen (day 17)

After the seven days, open up. Ideally you’ll spot the queen walking the comb, or eggs in the cells, or both. Don’t panic if you can’t see either straight away. In the right conditions a queen can take her time coming into lay, and it can be up to three weeks before eggs appear. I wouldn’t start worrying until about three weeks after introduction. If you’re still seeing no queen and no eggs by then, drop your supplier a message and they’ll help you work out what happened.

Start with a queen you can trust

The single biggest factor in a successful requeening is the queen herself. Introduce a well-bred, mated queen of known origin and you stack the odds in your favour. Introduce something cheap from an unknown source and you’re gambling with your colony.

Our queens are F1 Buckfast, mated and selected for calm temperament above everything else. We’ve shipped tens of thousands of them, and if one ever arrives dead or damaged we replace it free, no arguments. If calm bees are the goal, this is where you start, and we’re here every step of the way.

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