In this instructional video, beekeeper Laurence Edwards demonstrates a complete requeening protocol for a honeybee colony that has a problematic, aggressive queen. He first locates and kills the existing queen (Day 0) and then leaves the hive untouched for eight days, allowing the bees to start forming emergency queen cells. On Day 8 he removes every emergency queen cell, rendering the colony "hopelessly queenless"—a state that prevents the bees from raising their own queen without intervention. He then introduces a purchased, mated Buckfast queen (sourced from BlackMountainHoney.co.uk) using a Melitta queen cage placed between two brood frames. After 24 hours he opens both fondant tabs on the cage (one to let workers in, the longer one to release the queen) and returns the cage for at least seven days, avoiding any further disturbance. Weeks later he inspects the hive, confirming successful queen acceptance by observing a marked F1 Buckfast queen, abundant capped brood, and multiple frames of eggs and larvae. The video concludes with a brief endorsement of Black Mountain Honey’s mated queens and a note on providing sufficient space to prevent swarming.
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In today's video, I'm going to show you how to introduce a mated queen into a beehive using the best method possible. So I came into this apiary a few weeks ago now. I killed the existing queen because she was horrible. She was aggressive, and all of her daughters were causing me huge amounts of issues. 4 weeks later, I'm in a beautiful apiary. The bees are flying, and I'm not being hassled by my bees. The requeening has worked. But in this video, I'm going to rewind, and I'm going to show you all of the steps. Steps along the way. First step is you need to get inside and you need to find the queen that's causing the issue. Kill the queen, and on the day that you kill the queen, you need to refer to that day as day 0. Once you've killed the queen, you can close the colony back up and you basically have to do nothing for 8 days. What you're waiting for during those 8 days is for the colony to use up all of the resources that it has in order to requeen themselves. They'll start to feed the larva royal jelly and they'll turn that standard larva into an emergency queen cell. Emergency queen cells look like normal queen cells with a 90-degree bend in them. 8 days later, so day 8, you go back into your colony and what you need to do is shake off every single frame of bees and find these emergency queen cells. You need to take them down, but you need to make sure that you take down every single one. You cannot miss one or the requeening will fail. Once you've taken down all of those emergency queen cells, the colony is now hopelessly queenless. That means they don't have a queen, they don't have a mated queen, they don't have a virgin queen, but more importantly, they don't have the resources within that hive to prepare and create themselves a new queen without your intervention. Hopelessly queenless is where you want to be. On day 8, you can take your mated queen, available from blackmountainhoney.co.uk, and you want to place that into the hive. Just place it down in between 2 brood frames, and then you want to leave it for at least 24 hours for the bees to get used to the out of that new queen. After 24 hours, you want to come back in, pop the fondant tabs, and on the cages that we use, the Melitta queen cages, there are 2 fondant tabs. You need to make sure that you pop both of them open. One of the fondant tabs will let worker bees in, but only one fondant tab, the longer fondant tab, will let the queen out. So it's really important that you pop both of those tabs. Once you've popped those tabs, you place the queen cage back into the hive, And you leave it for at least 7 days. Don't go in and interfere at this point. Don't go in and think you wanna open the cage and try and make it easier for the queen. The more you intervene at that point, the higher the chances are of failure. The bees in that colony will eat through the fondant and they will release that queen. So that takes me back up here to the present day. We did that here a couple of weeks ago, and now I'm gonna go back in and I'm gonna show you the colony. I'm gonna show you the queen, and I'm gonna show you what it looks like once you've got that queen accepted. Now in this colony, I gave them some extra space because although there was some brood in here and I was requeening, they were very short on space and it is nice weather at the moment. So I wanted to make sure that they didn't swarm. Let's get inside though, see if we can find that queen and see if we have a successful queen introduction. So there's my first frame that I've pulled out. I think you'll agree we've definitely got a successfully mated queen in here and that the introduction has gone well. I added a mated queen about two weeks ago and I'm just coming back to double check that everything's okay and that she's been released. And I'm coming here to find beautiful frames of capped brood. Excellent first sign. And there we go. See if you can see the queen on that frame. A beautiful F1 Buckfast queen from Black Mountain Honey, marked green for 2024. Let's give you a close-up of her now. So a beautiful frame of brood. This Black Mountain Honey queen has been doing the business. She has laid up 6 frames of brood in that time. This frame is mostly capped over, but you can You can see some eggs and larvae in the middle there as well. Really, really happy with this queen introduction. So there we go, that's the end of the process. I've taken down the queen cells, made them hopelessly queenless, inserted the queen, 24 hours later popped the tabs, come back 7 days later to make sure that the queen is out of the cage, left it for a couple of weeks, and the requeening process is complete. If you've got horrible bees, if you've got angry bees, blackmountainhoney.co.uk. We've got the very best mated queens in the UK.
