In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey demonstrates the queen‑introduction‑cage method for safely introducing a mated queen into a hive. He explains why this method is ideal for defensive colonies or when using expensive breeder queens, outlines the low‑cost plastic cage assembly, and details the critical step of drenching the queen to remove attendant bees without risking her escape. Edwards then shows how to select a frame of newly emerging capped brood, pin the caged queen onto it to create a temporary "colony within a colony," and secure the cage corners. He emphasizes the importance of pre‑introduction preparation—making splits, removing all queen cells, and ensuring the target colony is hopelessly queenless—so the new queen is accepted. After placing the frame between open and emerging brood, the cage remains for about seven days, after which it is removed and the frame returned to the hive, completing a safe, gradual introduction. Throughout, he offers practical tips such as leaving a bead of honey on the frame and ensuring the cage is flush, and he frames the method as a belt‑and‑braces alternative to his usual postage‑cage technique.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Lawrence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today we're going to do queen introductions again, and this time we're going to use a queen introduction cage. So on the previous video, I showed you how to introduce queens using the postage cages. That's the method I use probably 99 times out of 100. I rarely use this method, but this is a good method to use if you've got a particularly defensive colony or if you've got a particularly expensive queen. So if you've got like a £400 or £500 breeder queen and you really, really don't want to lose her, this is the method to use. So this is a really, really good method. I know a lot of bee farmers that do use this method, but obviously for this method you need a queen cage. Now you can pick these up really cheap. £2 each, something like that. £2, £2.50 each. And the way that these work is they come like that, you break these bits off, and then this piece here plugs in there, and then you get 4 little spikes, and the spikes just go in the corner. So a little bit of pre-assembly required, takes about 30 seconds. So that is the cage complete. Obviously you've got your plug in there and then you've got your 4 spikes, 1, 2, 3, 4. So that's the cage complete. So how does this work and how does it differ from the other introduction method? So what you're trying to do with this method is you're trying to segregate the new queen and to accompany her with freshly emerged bees. And the idea behind that is that they form kind of like a colony within a colony, and then it gives a really gentle, slow introduction, which heightens the chances that your queen's going to be accepted. So what you would do, and I'll run through this in the video, but I'll just talk you through it first, is you take your queen in her introduction cage and you chuck it in some water. And I mean absolutely drench that queen. And then what that means is that you can safely open up that cage And pick out the queen with your fingers and put her underneath this cage. That's the only really safe way to do it to make sure that she doesn't fly off. Don't let your breeder queen fly off. Like, couldn't really be much worse than that, a £400 queen just flying off over the horizon. So you do that and we'll run through it. Chuck her in the water, drench her for a couple of seconds. She won't drown. And then you pick her up and then you want to take a frame of capped brood. It needs to be newly emerging brood, so you want definitely an area where you can see the bees starting to emerge through. Shake off every single bee so you're just left with the frame, and then you want to take the queen and you want to place her on that emerging brood and immediately pin her in with this cage. Now, other bees will be able to access the queen through here, so they can feed the queen through here. The newly emerging bees, that's what they're good at. They're good at feeding queens. So they will emerge and they will feed themselves and they will feed that queen. So you effectively get a colony within a colony. And then in the meantime, the rest of the colony might start to create emergency cells if you've recently taken a queen out. But if you're a bit more proactive than that, you've already gone through that process and made them hopelessly queenless before you do that. So you can do it either way. I'd always prefer to go make the colony hopelessly queenless first and then do this. So then you can leave it in there, leave it for at least a week, and then after that, simply remove the cage and put the frame back in the colony. And that's how you safely introduce a queen using a cage. So let's get our suit on, we'll go into the bees, and I'll show you exactly what I mean. Right, so you want to take your queen introduction cage like this, You can see the queen in there. So you want to take this and you want to go and chuck it into some water and completely submerge those bees and make sure they are truly drenched. And then that way you can go and pick out the queen with your fingers, make sure you don't squish her, and place her onto the frame where you're going to do this. So get your frame ready in the meantime. and do this at the very, very last minute. So when you're looking for the frame to use, that's what you want, something like that. As few open brood cells as you can possibly get, as much capped brood as you can possibly get. This is the side that I'm going to use here. What I like to do is if there's a bead of honey around it, I will contain that within it as well. And then that way the bees can feed themselves on the honey. If you just did it in the middle like that, you're reliant on other bees coming in and feeding. I like to just leave that little bit of honey in there. That gives you a bit of an insurance that the bees are able to feed themselves. So you'll take the queen introduction cage like that, and you just pop that onto the corner. So that's how it's going to be set up. Like I say, get all of this set up before you go and submerge your queen. Put it somewhere easy. And then you need to go and submerge your queen in some water. Now, once your queen is submerged in water, and I've just gone and submerged her now, that means what you can do is you can take away all of the attendant bees. So you're not trying to open it and get the attendant bees to fly off. You literally open it, take the queen out, pop her back in, chuck away all the attendant bees, and you just get left with your queen in a cage And she's wet so she can't fly off. That's where you want to be. Then you can safely take your queen, put her on the frame like that, and put your introduction cage in. Make sure it's pinned in all of the corners. You don't want it coming loose. You don't want bees to be able to burrow. You want to have it nice and smooth and flush to that. And that's it. So all you do now is you go back into your colony and you place this frame at the middle in between some open and emerging brood. So give it some open on one side, emerging on the other side. You just pop it back in like that. Close the colony up. Come back in 7 days and then you can take that cage out and you should get a really, really nice safe introduction. So what I've missed out on this video is the fact that before this you need to do what I've done in previous videos. So make your splits, take the bees away, separate the flying bees, knock back all the queen cells, and then you jump into this phase here. So it turns into a 2-week process. First week is getting rid of the worker bees, the flying bees. Day 7, get rid of all the queen cells, they're hopelessly queenless, then you can move on to this phase. 7 days later, you'll come in, you'll just take that cage off, and the bees are good to go. It's a really safe, easy introduction method. So we'll close these guys back up now, come back in 7 days. So that's it, it's as simple as that. That's a different method for queen introduction. That's a queen introduction method using an introduction cage. So like I say, just make sure you jump through all those steps as normal, split off the worker bees, kill all the queen cells, make sure the colony is hopelessly queenless, no laying workers, and then move on to that step where you put the queen into some water, separate her from the attendants, put her underneath the cage, pin it against some emerging brood. 7 days later, you've got a really successful introduction. So I would use that on a really expensive breeder queen. I find my other method works very well as well though. So that is, that's a belt and braces method, and one if you're not overly confident about using the other method or you've had issues with using the other method. So that's it for today's video. Hope you've enjoyed it. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.
