Five Modes Of Failure For Queen Introduction

The top 5 reasons that mated queen introductions fail. Now, we sell a huge amount of queens every year at Black Mountain Honey, and we want the very best for our queens, so we're doing this video to try and give you some good advice to help you get your queens introduced successfully. The number one reason that I think that mated queen introductions fail is that when you're putting the mated queen inside the colony, there is already a queen in there. Now when I speak to some customers, they say, no, definitely not a queen in there. I've inspected it like 3 or 4 times and there is definitely not a queen in my hive, so I'm placing a new queen in to requeen the colony. And I always do like a little bit of digging with the customers and say, well, do you know, talk me through what's happened. Did you take the queen out yourself, or what happened? And I would say 9 times out of 10, the answer is, well, they swarmed about 3 or 4 weeks ago and the queen left, and there's no eggs, there's no brood, and there's no queen, so they're hopeless. queenless. And I say, well, it's not— that's not hopelessly queenless. All that means is that the bees have swarmed, and whenever the bees swarm, the original queen goes. They leave behind swarm cells. The swarm cells emerge into virgin queens, and then if you're lucky, the virgin queens go out and mate and you get a new mated queen. Or if you get the weather that we had in May, I can guarantee your bees did not mate, the queens did not mate, and then you'll have runt virgins, failed virgins, running around the hive that you need to find every single one and you need to kill. The before you introduce a queen. That is the biggest mode of failure, I would say. The difference between queenless and hopelessly queenless is that if they're queenless, they don't have a queen, they don't have a virgin, but they have the ability to create a new one through eggs, through larva. Hopelessly queenless means there's no queen, there's no eggs, there's no larva, there's only capped brood and bees. That is hopelessly queenless, and that is the recommendation that I'll give you at the end of this video to show you how to get So if your bees have swarmed and you're going back in after 2 or 3 weeks and you don't see a queen, you don't see any eggs, you don't see any brood, that does not mean your colony is queenless. And there is a really simple test that you can do to make sure that you know if the colony is queenless or not. You take a frame of eggs, you place a frame of eggs in the middle of the brood box, give it a few days, and come back and see what the bees do with the larvae once they've hatched out from the eggs. If they do nothing, if those eggs turn into larvae, turn into capped brood, into pupae, and just start emerging as normal, then that means that you do have a queen of sorts inside your colony of bees. Probably going to be a virgin queen at that point, but the response to that frame gives you the indication that there is a queen present. Now, if you were to introduce a mated queen at that point, the virgin inside that colony would kill that mated queen. So do not do that. You need to do the test First, you need to find the virgin. You need to kill that queen. If you put the frame of eggs inside your colony and they start drawing out emergency queen cells, that gives you the indication that there is no queen in that hive, and it means that you can safely go ahead, introduce a mated queen once you've taken down all of those queen cells after eight days. Really important that you wait eight days for taking them down because you're getting the bees back to the state of hopelessly queenless—not just a queenless where they're. Still got the resources through eggs and larvae to create their own queen, but hopelessly queenless, where it's just bees and capped brood, and you're forcing them, making them accept that new mated queen that you've put in because they have no other option whatsoever. So that's the first mode, introducing a queen into a colony where there is a queen already there. The next mode of failure ties in quite nicely with that other one there, which is introducing a queen into a colony where they are only queenless, they are not hopelessly queenless. So let's say, for example, you take a split, make a split here today. I'm taking eggs, I'm taking brood in all stages, I'm taking bees, I'm taking stores, putting them off into one side, making up a nuc, and then going back the next day, popping in the queen, taking off the tab, coming back a week later to find maybe all of the bees dead in the cage or nothing in the cage. They've cleared it out. What you've done there is you've made a queenless split, but you've not given it enough time to become mature, to to become hopelessly queenless. Now I would say the first method results in 100% failure. If you put a queen into a colony that's got a virgin queen in there, the mated queen will be killed 100% of the time. This next method where you're making a split up in a queenless method, not hopelessly queenless, and you put a new queen in, it's not to say that this will always fail, but it fails quite a lot of the time. I would say 50/50, roughly like that. I know a lot of bee farmers that use that method and say they have 70%, 80%, But for me, it needs to be 100% successful. I don't want to send queens out to people and then give them a method that's 80% successful, because then 20% of the queens are going to be killed. I want 100% of those queens to be alive. So that's the second method, making up a queenless nuc, putting the mated queen in, and then the bees say, you know what, we prefer to make our own queen from the larva that we've still got open. So we're going to open you up, we're going to kill you, and we're just going to make our own queen. Thanks, but no thanks. Now the next method of failure is a really unfortunate one, and this is probably the most frustrating one of all of them. If you've got a colony of really dark bees, but this applies to any different genetics, so if you're introducing, say, a Buckfast queen into like a Carniolan colony, but in the UK specifically, if you've got like dark local Mongol bees and you're putting in a Buckfast queen into a hopelessly queenless state colony, what they often do is that they accept the queen and they say, yep, thanks very much, we'll accept you. really like your color, but we'll accept you anyway. They let them lay a few eggs, and then they bump off the queen, kill the queen, and then they try and supersede the queen from those eggs. Now, the reason that they're doing that is they're trying to somehow preserve their own genetics, which doesn't really make a huge amount of sense. I know you're going to get the local drones and stuff in the air, but they're using the eggs from the Buckfast queen to rear themselves a new queen. But this is just a slight nuance of introducing Buckfast queens or different genetic queens into AMMs. So my advice, if you're going down this route and you're seeing this, is once the queen has started laying, go back into the colony every single 3 days. And if you start to see the signs of emergency cells, or you start to see the signs of more likely a supersedure cell, take it down straight away. And if you take it down straight away and get it to the point where the buckfast brood is beginning to emerge, then they stop doing it. And I know that from personal experience. There's nothing wrong with the queen. That is just the difference between the 2 genetics and a mechanism that the bees are using to try and preserve their own genetics. The 4th mode of failure, and the really frustrating one for me, is when people don't follow the instructions on the queens. So we say as soon as the queens arrive, put them into the beehive. And we allow on Black Mountain Honey, you can have a selection of dates, so you can schedule the queen to arrive on the exact date, day 8, if you're making a hopelessly queenless split. You want the queen to arrive, and within a couple of hours you want to place it into the colony. Now the reason that you want to do that is the way that queen bees are fed is that nurse bees will go and gorge themselves on honey and pollen, produce royal jelly, and then they will feed the queen. That's what keeps the queen in the best condition possible. The attendants that come in the queen cages, they're good for a certain amount of time, but as those nurse bees become older and as they don't have access to really good quality nutrition in the cages, feeding of that queen becomes substandard, and you cannot replicate what is actually going on in the hive in a small cage like that. So the mode of failure is people getting the queen on, say, a Friday And then keeping it at home until a Sunday when they're going to go and do their beekeeping. I do say to people, if you desperately need to keep them somewhere, keep them in a dark place, keep them in a cool place, give them a drop of water every few hours. But I do not recommend that. That is not my advice. My advice is take the mated queen in the cage, place it into the colony within a couple of hours of it arriving, and that is the best possible way that you can keep your queens in good condition And make sure that they're introduced successfully. The next mode of failure is people going in and fussing their bees and not following the process. Really easy way to get your queen balled this way. So you might have made up a hopelessly queenless nuc, the bees have accepted the queen, you go in after a couple of days just to check that she's out the cage, she's out the cage, you lift up the frame and you're like, whoa, what's going on here? And the bees are like balling the queen. And that is as a result of a stressor to the colony, and that stressor is you. Do not go in, do not intervene. The process that I like to do is day 8, you take down all of the queen cells, put the queen in at the same time, leave it 24 hours, come back, pop the tabs, and then don't go back for 7 days. That's the process. And when you go back in after 7 days, you should see the queen, you should see eggs, although it can take kind of like 2 to 3 weeks for the queen to come back into lay fully. Don't go in too early 'cause it can wreck the process. Now I know I said there was only 5 modes of failure. There's probably loads more modes of failure as well. Just thinking about another one which I experienced recently with a customer, which was they'd gone through that process, hopelessly queenless, added the queen in, popped the tabs, and at the moment they popped the tabs they thought, well, I'm going to add in a frame of brood because the bees are getting a bit small, they're shrinking, so I'm going to add a frame of brood in to help them out. And then the bees just said, right, thanks very much, we're just going to create queen cells on that frame of brood and we're not going to accept the queen. If you need to add frames of brood in, wait until the queen's been accepted, wait until the queen is laying, and then you can safely add a frame of emerging brood Obviously shake all of the bees off as well. Don't add new bees in because they will just kill the queen. So these aren't necessarily modes of failures, but something that can go wrong with the introduction of queens is that they can arrive and that they're just dead in the post. We fully underwrite that service, so if you do get a queen, it's dead in the post, no quibble, we'll just send you out a brand new queen free of charge, free postage from the next batch. Doesn't happen often, but sometimes it does, but we do underwrite that service. We also underwrite in the first season, if the queen becomes a drone-laying queen, if it's still the same queen with the same mark, you just need to drop us an email and we'll fix that one for you as well, free of charge. Send you out a brand new queen if the same queen has turned drone-laying in the year. It does need to be the same queen, needs to have exactly the same mark, and you need to send us a picture of the same queen that's been killed. We will then replace the queen for you. So just to finish this video off, I'll just run through the method that I use one more time. If you're looking to requeen a colony or make a split, the same method applies. So you need to kill the original queen or make a split that doesn't have a queen in it. At that point, the colony that you've got is queenless. There's no queen, but they're not hopelessly queenless. They have eggs, they have larvae, they have the ability to create themselves a new queen. 8 days needs to elapse from the day that you kill the queen until the day that you take down the cells. So the bees, in response to you killing the queen, under the emergency impulse, will create lots of emergency queen cells. They're different from swarm and supersedure cells in that they're not interplay cups and they have a 90-degree bend in them. When you're looking for these cells, shake every single frame, all of the bees off, and kill all of the little queen cells that you can see. On the same day, you can put your queen in. Do not pop the tabs yet on the fondant cage. 24 hours later— I used to advise 48 hours, but 24 hours is absolutely fine— go back in, pop the tabs on the fondant cage. Don't slide it open. Don't open it up, don't leave a little gap for the bees to get through, just pop the tabs on the fondant cage as it shows you on the website, and you can see a little picture of it here, and then leave it for 7 days. That's it. You can use masking tape if you want, but I wouldn't use masking tape unless you have a really big strong colony, and I wouldn't use masking tape unless you have a real reason to use masking tape. Some people like to put a bit of masking tape over the fondant with a slit in it just to slow things down. I don't use that generally. I see other people use it, there's nothing wrong with it, But I'll only use that if I've got like an expensive queen that I really want to slow down the introduction on. Maybe like a breeder queen, maybe an artificially inseminated queen. Go back in after 7 days, you should see the queen wandering around on the frames. If you've followed all of that advice there and you've avoided all of those modes of failure, you should have a successful introduction. If I've missed any of them, stick them in the comments. I'm really keen to know. I can potentially update the video in future years.