went to replace my queen today with a new ordered queen but couldn’t locate the original even though she was originally marked. I noticed queen cells had commenced to be formed which I removed. I decided to install the new queen anyway. What could be the complications?
@walks Hi Ron, I have a question: Why were you re-queening? In the past I did a lot of re-queening, because: people said I should. In a lot of cases I would have been better off sticking to the old queen. It’s kind of “if it’s not broken, don’t try & fix it”. I wonder if your old queen died & the bees were superseding her. Take a look in a week to see if you have a queen, & which one. If you don’t have a queen, insert a couple of frames of brood into the brood area & let the bees make a new one.
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99.999% chance your caged queen will be killed.
Queen spotting:
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If the hive is currently making queen cells either because it is queenless or because they are trying to supercede is it possible they will accept the new queen because they are “in the market” for a new queen anyway?
I agree with Michael. You have probably wasted your money. No matter why you were re-queening you MUST make sure the colony are Q-
I had to re-queen a swarm earlier in the year, the bees had turned aggressive and I decided to change the breed of bee to make them docile. I went through every frame looking for the marked queen but to no avail, in the end I finally found her in hiding on the bottom of the frame in between the cells and wood, the original queen had been superceded so the mark was gone. As I would inspect the frame she would scamper to underside, turn the frame over and she scamped back through the gap to the underside. You may need to look more closely. Also, I use frame holders in a large plastic tub so if she falls off she can be spotted and not end up on the ground.
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Thanks to the Flow hive community for your generous responses. I suspected I was going to be lucky if it worked out and so I will have to wait a little while to see the outcome. I very much appreciate each and everyone of your feedback,
regards,
Walks
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