In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards demonstrates a streamlined technique for requeening a highly aggressive beehive. He first outlines the conventional method—locating and killing the existing queen, waiting eight days for the colony to become queenless, then searching the frames for hidden emergency queen cells before introducing a new queen—highlighting its labor‑intensive nature and the risk of missed cells leading to failed introductions. Edwards then presents an innovative alternative received via email: capture the current queen in a sealed postal cage (optionally with fondant), return the cage to the brood area, and leave it for eight days. Because the queen remains present, the bees do not initiate emergency queen cell production, eliminating the need for a second thorough frame inspection. After the eight‑day period, the cage is removed and swapped for a cage containing a new queen, with a 24‑hour wait before releasing her. Edwards emphasizes the method’s simplicity, reduced hive disturbance, and safety benefits, noting he plans to adopt it for all future requeening operations, regardless of colony temperament.
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In this video, I'm going to show you a really simple, quick, easy method for requeening a very, very angry beehive. Now, it used to be easy going through my colonies and saying, right, I'm going to pick out a nice angry beehive to do this video on. I have lost my effing— ah, ow! But nowadays it's a little bit more difficult because most of my colonies are nice. Now, that would have been a good chance for one of you bees to sting me. If you understood comedic effect, that would have been the chance to get me there. But we will proceed because these bees are quite friendly. But you never know, I might get stung throughout this But the normal way that I would introduce a queen to try and requeen an angry beehive is that I would go into this colony of bees and I would say, right, that's it, you're squished. I'd kill the queen and then the clock would start ticking. So I have to go into the colony once, find the queen, kill her, and then I'm waiting 8 days to enable that colony to become hopelessly queenless. And then I've gotta go back in again to take down all of the emergency queen cells. Now on a normal-sized colony or a friendly colony, That's not the end of the world, but it is still quite easy to miss those emergency queen cells. I've done it before where you really cannot see them at all because they've hidden them some way in the brood. And even with going through and shaking off every single frame, if you miss just one of those emergency queen cells and then try and introduce a new queen, you might get a failed introduction. So I was sent this method by someone on email and I thought, what an ingenious method. I'm definitely gonna do a video on this. So this is the new process that I will use for requeening angry colonies. What I will do is I will go into the angry colony and I will go through it and I will find the queen. But instead of killing the queen, what I will do at that point is I'll get like a postal cage, a queen postal cage, and I'll take that angry queen and I'll put it into the postal cage. I'll make sure that it's fully sealed up. You can put some fondant in there if you want, you don't have to. The main thing here is that the queen cannot get And then I'll put that cage back in the colony. So what you've done there is you've trapped the queen and you've put that back within the brood area, but somewhere where it's really easy just to go back in and take it out. Then what you do is you then wait 8 days. So what you're doing is you're getting that colony hopelessly queenless, but in a completely different way. And you're doing it in such a way that you don't have to go back through and find the emergency cells because the bees don't create emergency cells because they think think that they're still queen right. When I was reading through the details on the email of this process, I was just thinking, this is ingenious. This is such a good process and such a simple way of doing it. Mitigates the number of times you need to come in, but most importantly, it mitigates having to go through shaking off all of those frames, trying to find emergency cells in like a hive, a hot hive from hell. Ow. And then you come back to your colony, there's no emergency queen cells 'cause the bees have been queen right that whole time. She just hasn't been able to lay. And then all you need to do, take that cage out and replace it for the cage with your new queen in. At that point, I would definitely wait 24 hours before popping the tab, and then I would just leave the colony to go through, eat through that fondant, and the introduction is complete. Like, it's so, so much easier than the previous method that I've been doing, and it's probably the method that I'm gonna adopt going forward for requeening any colony, regardless of if they're angry or if they're friendly.
