How Late Can You Requeen A Beehive - Late Season Queen Replacement Explained

Today I'm going to show you how late in the season you can requeen a colony of bees. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Surprising amount of times I've been asked for this video, how late can you requeen your bees? And what I would say to you first is, why are you requeening your bees and why are you doing it late in the season? I'm going to answer those 2 questions first And then I'm going to go into a colony and I'm going to requeen a colony. And we're in the last week of September at the moment. And then finally, I'll answer the question, how late realistically do you think you can go in the year to actually requeen your bees? So the caveat that I would put in here is don't go into your colonies towards the back end of September, middle of September, October, pull out some frames and you're not seeing any brood, you're not seeing any eggs, and you think I need to requeen because there's no queen. There's no eggs, there's no brood. I need to get a queen in there because otherwise they're going to go through the year queenless. Bees very often take a brood break in September, October, even into August they can take a brood break as well. So definitely don't requeen your colonies on the basis that you can't find the queen and there's no brood and there's no eggs. If you do find that, I would suggest following another one of my videos. I've got a couple of videos on this. Put a test frame in there, frame of eggs. If they draw out emergency cells, Then you've not got a queen. If they leave it alone and do nothing, they turn it into capped brood, then you've got a queen in the hive. So that's a really good test, save you £50 to go and buy an additional queen. But in terms of requeening late on in the year, I have to say I find this is the best time of the year to requeen your bees. If you're going to do it religiously, if you're, say, going to requeen every year, or you're going to requeen every other year, and you want to kind of think, when's the best time to requeen my bees? If you look at the beekeeping calendar, the huge demand for bees is in April and May. Massive demand at that time of year. And bees at that time of year, they're expanding really, really quickly. It's more difficult to get acceptance rates that early on in the year. Later on in the year, it's so much easier. Like, the bees do just sense that they are desperate, and if you take their queen away and you give them any old queen, they're just going to accept it, because if they don't accept it, they will die. And they definitely know that. Like, I've had queens where they just accept it after a couple of days, and you can tell by the temperament that's going on, the way they're reacting to the cage, the way they're reacting to those pheromones, they're clearly accepting that queen. So I've had really, really good experience of just religiously requeening late on in the year. Now, the purpose of this video though is to show you how late you can requeen your colony. I think you can go really, really late on into the year. I would say the latest you could possibly go Is as long as you're able to get mated queens. We're in the last week of September now, it's nearly October. If you take a look around, you speak to breeders, they're shutting down. We haven't had queens for a good while now. It's not to say you can't still get them now, and the quality of them now is actually very, very good. However, you can't really get that many. So I think a good rule of thumb is if you can get access to a mated queen, you You can requeen your colony. That's what I'm going to say in the UK. So if you can get hold of a queen in the UK, no matter whether that's middle of September, back end of September, even going into early to mid to late October, I would say if the weather is good, you can get hold of a mated queen, you can requeen your hive for whatever reason. Now you need to make sure you go through all of the steps that you would normally go through if you're requeening a colony. Kill the existing queen or take the existing queen away. Let them go queenless. You can store the new queen in the colony while you do that. 8 days later, go back, knock down all the emergency cells, put the queen in with the tab. 48 hours, pop the tab. 7 days later, check up on them. That is my process, and that is a process that works really, really well. You can do that any time of the year that you can get hold of a mated queen, and that's going to be my rule of thumb because I don't think you're going to be able to get hold of mated queens in the middle of October, back end of October. And if you do, you might get them, say, from a friend or someone that's got a surplus at that time of year. And I would just question the viability of anybody who's selling queens that late on in the year. Why have they got a surplus? How long have they been sitting around for? I think you need to go to a respected breeder of queens or a packager of queens, and when they stop selling them for the season, I'd say that is the natural cutoff. You want me to commit to a date? I'm going to say 1st of October. That is the date for me where I'm gonna say, right, I'm not gonna requeen any of my colonies anymore. I'm gonna have been through all of them. I'm gonna have shaken out all the duds. I'm gonna have killed any of the drone-laying queens. I'm gonna have combined any of the weak colonies. I can do all of that in September. Plenty of time to be doing that. October, you're moving into heavy feeding and you should only really be heavy feeding valid, viable colonies. Do all of those checks in September. So here we are, back end of September. It's about 3 or 4 days away from October now. I'm going to go in there and I'm going to requeen a colony with a very special German island-mated Buckfast queen. Right, how late in the season can you requeen a hive? Last week of September, we're going to replace the queens in one of these nucs with my German Buckfast breeder queen. Might as well tell you the whole story. Why am I exchanging the queens in this hive? It's one of my older queens. I put her in a nuc, I requeened the colony, I thought I'd give her another chance. And she is horrible. She's an aggressive queen, she's not very nice. So all I'm going to do, I'm going to kill that queen and I'm going to put the breeder queen in there to replace her. And I'm doing that at the end of September. So this is the colony that I'm replacing, and you might think, wow, she's a really good queen. And she is. Like, they bring in the honey, they're really good and disease resistant, they're prolific, but they are horrible. Really super aggressive bees. And you'll see it as soon as I start taking the frames out here. It's not what I want. It's not what I want in my apiary. It's not what I want my drones behaving like. So I'm going to take the queen out. I'm just going to squish her, and I'm going to replace it with a really nice friendly queen. So there is my old queen. Looks like a really nice queen, doesn't she? But she is not nice, so she's going to get the squish, and I'm going to replace her with the new German Buckfast queen. Does seem a shame. It's a really strong nuc. Great quality, strong nuc, but I did want to choose a really strong nuc, and it's something I would add is don't go requeening really weak colonies this late in the year thinking that you're going to revive them by adding in a new queen. You really can't do that. They need to be big, they need to be strong, they need to be vibrant colonies in order to accept that queen and in order to actually get them through until next year. So don't think adding a new queen in like Last week of September, first week of October. Don't think it's a silver bullet and that it's going to fix all of the troubles that you've had throughout the season. That's not the time to be fixing those sort of troubles. What you want to be fixing at this time of year is temperament, and that's pretty much it. Everything else should be fixed earlier. Anything disease should have gone. Anything drone laying should have gone. You only want to fix a big, strong, angry hive really this late in the year. So I'm the biggest wuss in the world. I couldn't kill the queen even though I gave it the big one there and said I was going to squish her. I'll probably go and take her to an apiary where I don't mind them being too aggressive and make up a split or something, cuz you can do splits this time of the year as well. So yeah, every time I do that, I think, right, I'm going to squish her, I'm going to be strong, I'm going to be bold, and I'm just boosting the horrible genes down at the horrible apiary. But at least they pulled me in some honey. So there we go, I didn't kill the queen. She is in a cage. I'll add some fondant to her and they will go somewhere So this colony here is now queenless. Remember, they're not hopelessly queenless. I'm not going to cover all of the elements in this video because I'll just be repeating myself. I'll send you out to a link on how you follow this process. All I'm going to do in here, I'm going to get the queen in and close them up. I'm going to finish the video and I'll do you an update later on in the season to show you maybe the first round of brood that this queen has laid. So there's the last shot of the queen. I'll get them together. That's the old queen. This is the new queen. We're gonna get this queen into the colony now. We're gonna leave them sealed for 8 days, knock down all the queen cells, come back, pop the cage another week later, and then that queen will be reintroduced. Now, what I wanted to show you at this time is this is literally 3 seconds after I put that cage in there. Look at the reaction of the bees to that queen. Doesn't look very aggressive, does it? Now, I know that it's very hard to judge, and I'm not gonna say, right, let's pop the cage because it's not an aggressive reaction. But you put queens in early in the year and some of the— you literally get them smothering the cage because they just hate the smell of that queen's pheromone. Interesting. Last week of September, not getting any of that, getting relatively okay reactions to the queen. And I think within a few hours they're going to well and truly accept her and they'll be feeding her through that cage. So final thing to do on this colony here is mark the back Because I've got my breeder queen in there. You can make as many good notes as you can. I like to mark the roof just so I know where that breeder queen is. I'll come back in 8 days, I'll do the business, I'll release that queen. But believe me, you can introduce queens right into the end of September, early October, if they're available in the UK. So there you go, simple as that. I'm not going to show you all the steps in this video because I have done this to death. There are plenty of videos showing you how to requeen the colony. I'll send you out to a link just if you want to see how to go about it. I've discussed the method in a bit of detail in this video as well, but I think absolutely no problem whatsoever. Last week of September, first week of October, you can easily requeen your colonies that late in the year. And not only that, I would say that is the best time of the year to requeen them for 2 reasons. First one is you're going to get excellent acceptance rates if you follow all of the criteria to make sure that they're hopelessly queenless and you give them enough time to knock down emergency cells. But also those young queens that have been mated in, say, August, if you're requeening with that 2021 queen that's been mated in August, she is going to go through winter and not lay that many eggs. And then she goes into the next season and she is going to lay those frames up like an absolute machine. You really do get outstanding growth on the colonies that are requeened later on in the year versus the ones that are, say, requeened in April or May. Far younger, they're a lot more vibrant, a lot more dynamic, and they do tend to expand at a much faster rate. So that's it for the video. I hope you enjoyed that one. I hope you've requeened all of your colonies by now. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.