Laurence Edwards shows how to free a queen bee stuck in her introduction cage. If the fondant dissolves too slowly, shake the bees out, submerge the cage in water to scare the queen into leaving, then crack it open so she can walk into the colony.
When you're introducing queens into a colony, sometimes they're a bit slow to get through the fondant, and that's generally as a result of not leaving it too long or the nucs being a little bit too small. This one here, I'm trying to rush one through. I want to show you the video as well, but let's get this cage out now. It's been in there for about 3 days, and you can see here we've still got the queen in the cage. She's alive, and they've just started to work through the fondant. What I'm going to show you is how to deal with this if this happens and how to make sure the queen doesn't So take your queen cage, shake off all the bees, pop it into a little glass of water. You'll see the queen there, she's escaped the water, and this is what she can't do. So you need to make sure that she is fully submerged. I know this is a little bit horrific, but it works, and the queens are absolutely fine. Once you're happy that that queen is completely submerged, all you do is you just open up a little gap And you watch that queen just walk out into the colony and down safely into
