How To Introduce A Mated Queen Bee
- Laurence Edwards
- Jan 16, 2024
- 6 min read
How to introduce a mated queen bee into a beehive?
Introducing mated queen bees into a beehive can be a challenging but highly rewarding process. In this blog, I will detail the reasons why you might consider requeening a beehive, discuss the process for introducing a new mated queen and help you steer clear of some of the mistakes that can be made.
Why should you requeen your beehive?
There are many reason you might consider requeening your beehive.
Temperament: Aggressive colonies of bees are not good fun. They make inspections awkward and it's the easiest way to annoy your neighbours. Requeening an aggressive colony with a mated queen of known heritage will resolve the issue of aggression but it can take around 10-12 weeks to take effect as the older bees die off.
Disease: Diseases, viruses and infections such as chalk brood, sac brood, bald brood and even EFB can often be eradicated by requeening your colony with a queen of known heritage. It's good practise to combine the requeening with comb replacement before the introduction to reduce the chance of reinfection.
Age: Queens will need to replaced every 2-3 years. You can leave the bees to do this for you through a process called supersedure, but this does not guarantee the queen will be correctly mated and some still like to requeen with a mated queen. At BMH, we requeen our hives every 2 years.
Making Increase: One of the most common reason for introducing a mated queen is making splits for increase. We have a separate page detailing how to split beehives, but the process is very similar to requeening your bees. You just take a split from a colony to include BIAS and stores and then add a mated queen.
Suitability: There are many sub species of honey bee across the world. Some sub species/hybrids are better suited to tasks than others. For example, Buckfast bees are very prolific and great for making splits, whilst AMM create very pure, white wax honey cappings. You may wish to requeen for a specific reason.
Failing Queen: Replacing a failing queen is probably the number one reason to requeen a beehive. Queens fail in many ways but most result in them turning into drone laying queens. When you replace a DLQ, you need to find her, kill her and then follow the steps above to ensure you achieve a successful introduction.
Check out our dedicated guide on the Reasons To Requeen Your Beehive - HERE
When to requeen your beehive?
The vast majority of methods to requeen your beehives require you to first find and kill the incumbent queen. I know, this is a horrible task and it never gets any easier, but it’s for the greater good as the queen bees carries the traits and genetics for every single other bee within the hive.
She carries the blueprint for success and thus, in order to change the way a colony behaves or any other trait, you must first dispatch the incumbent queen. The easiest and quickest way to do this is to pick up the queen by her wings and squish her immediately between your fingers. It’s not nice even writing that down!
In order to find the queen, it really does help to requeen as early as possible in the season, when the colony is small and limited to a portion of the brood box. Try to aim for between April and May (in the UK). The added by product of early requeening is that the new mated queen is less likely to swarm in her first season if you give enough space.
However, queens can be replaced at any point throughout the active season. As long you can find the existing queen, you can replace her.
How to requeen your beehive?
Requeening a beehive is a fairly simple but probably daunting process. Follow the steps below to ensure you give your new queen the best chance of survival.
Day 0: This is generally the hardest part of requeening a beehive you MUST find the queen. If you do not find the queen and you go and ahead and introduce a mated queen, the original queen will just kill her. If you cant find her, take a look at this video to help track her down - FIND A QUEEN.
Day 0: It's never nice to kill a living creature but in order to successfully requeen a beehive, you must first dispatch the original queen. Once you have found the queen, pick her up and squish her between your fingers. This is the most humane method to kill a queen as it's as quick as it can possibly be. Once the queen has been killed, close the hive back and leave the bees alone for 8 days.
Day 8: After 8 days, go through every single frame and shake the bees off. Identify all emergency cells and remove then. Double check - you need to remove ALL the cells.
Day 8: Immediately after destroying ALL the emergency cells, the colony is now hopelessly queenless. They have no queen and no resources (eggs or larvae) to create one. Add a mated queen, in a sealed queen cage and place between two frames of brood. Do not remove the tab covering the fondant.
Day 10: Leave the sealed cage in between the brood frames for 24 hrs. This allows the bees to get used to the smell of their new queen.
Day 11: You can remove the plastic tab to expose the fondant. Place the cage back between the frames of brood and the bees will slowly release the queen.
Day 18: After 1 week, we go back and check for eggs to see if the queen has been successfully introduced. If you see eggs, then there is no need to see the queen. If you dont see eggs, try and locate the queen. It can take 2-3 weeks for mated queens to come back into lay following being caged
We stock a wide range of mated queen bees for sale at Black Mountain Honey. Our favourite are the F1 Buckfast Queens. You can buy queen bees from Black Mountain Honey - HERE
How do you know if it was a success?
Seven to fourteen days after popping the tab on the fondant cage, you can return to your colony of bees and what you are looking for, in the middle of the frames of brood, is neatly laid eggs. Queens can take up to three weeks to lay eggs post introduction so you do need to be patient. Once you see eggs, you can rest assured the new queen is laying well.
It’s always nice to see the new marked queen at this point but don’t worry if you don’t see her, just keep an eye out for her eggs. Fast forward another 7 days and you should see nice patches of capped worker brood. Once you see patches of capped worker brood in a nice pattern, alongside the new marked mated queen can you rest assured the introduction was successful.
How long does it take to have any effect?
It can take up to 8 weeks to start to see any effect from your new queen. Her first brood won’t be emerging until around 3 weeks after she starts laying eggs, but this will have a negligible effect on the colony. After 6-8 weeks, the difference is more pronounced but it’s not until the following season where the true impact should be assessed. At the beginning of the new season, every single bee that is in the colony is the offspring of your new mated queen and at this point the colony will be transformed.
What can go wrong?
Quite sadly, there is LOTS that can go wrong. However, if you follow the steps above, you will have a very good chance of introducing your queen successfully.
Detailed below are a list of common failures when it comes to introducing mated queen bees.
Not killing ALL the queens before introduction: The method above assumes you only have one mated queen in your colony. If the colony recently swarmed, there could be numerous unmated virgins in the hive. If you leave a single queen whether she is mated or not in the hive during introduction, it will fail. The incumbent queen always wins. Make sure you find and kill every single queen. If it down, shake them through a queen excluder as show in this video – HERE.
Not taking down ALL the emergency queen cells: If you leave a single emergency queen cell, whilst attempting to make them hopelessly queen-less, the introduction will fail. The virgin queen will emerge from the missed cell and kill the caged queen. The virgin always wins. Make sure you shake the bees off every single frame and check for emergency cells and remove them all. Don’t miss a single one.
Trying to rush the process: I know, it’s quite a long winded process but it works. It’s the process we have been using for the past 7 years and it never fails when performed correctly. Don’t rush any of the steps, the timings are crucial to the success of the introduction.
Queens not leaving the cage: Occasionally, the queens choose not to leave the cages even once the fondant has been eaten. If that happens, follow the advice in THIS video.
Conclusion
Once you get the hang of queen introduction, it’s a fairly simple process and comes with very little risk but huge rewards. Our mated queens for sale have the ability to transform your colony of bees to improve their temperament, placidity and prolificacy.
Check out the video above which shows our mated bees in action. If you are interested in our mated queens for sale, you can learn more HERE.
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