In this instructional video, beekeeper Laurence Edwards demonstrates a complete requeening protocol designed to convert an aggressive, queen‑right honeybee colony into a calm, gentle one. He begins by introducing a highly defensive colony sourced from an allotment, describing its “brood‑and‑a‑half” configuration and aggressive behavior. Edwards locates the marked 2021 queen, explains his reluctance but necessity of killing her, and makes clear the distinction between a merely queenless and a “hopelessly queenless” hive. He outlines an eight‑day period during which the colony, now queenless, will produce emergency queen cells; on day 8 he removes these cells to ensure hopeless queenlessness. He then introduces a mated F1 Buckfast queen in a fondant cage, allows 24–48 hours for acclimation, pops the fondant tab, and gives the bees another seven days before fully releasing the queen. Throughout, he provides practical tips (timing, equipment placement, optimal weather conditions) and ethical reflections on queen killing. The video fast‑forwards three months to show the transformed colony’s markedly calmer temperament, confirming the success of the protocol.
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In this video, I'm going to show you how to transform an angry colony of bees into a gentle, calm colony of bees. As always with these videos, we're going to show you every single step along the way. Everything will be stitched together, starting off with some very, very feisty, angry bees that we've adopted from someone where they'd kept them on the allotment. We brought them back to our apiary here. We're going to requeen them using an F1 Buckfast queen. Process we're going to follow is we're going to go in there today, We're gonna kill the queen, we're gonna leave it 8 days, wait for them to draw out emergency cells, knock down those emergency cells, add in the F1 Buckfast queen, give it 2 days, pop the tab, give it another 7 days, let the bees eat through that fondant, release that queen, and then we are gonna fast forward 3 months. I'll give you a few little updates in between as well, but what I wanna make sure is that every single bee that is living in that beehive at the moment is dead. Dead before I start analyzing them to see how calm they are. No point doing this manipulation and then going back 3 weeks after you've put the F1 Buckfast queen in there and saying, wow, they're still really, really angry. That's because you've still got maybe 70 or 80% of the angry bees from the previous queen. This video here is going to take a little while to stitch it all together, but don't worry, you'll see it at the very end of this video, how I've turned a really angry, horrible colony of bees into a really calm, gentle colony of bees.
First thing we're going to do, we're going to go inside, identify the status of this colony, find the queen, kill the queen. So this colony here is on brood and a half, and you can see them trying to attack the camera already. Brood and a half means there's a national deep and a national shallow, or any configuration. If you're a Langstroth, you might have a medium Langstroth and a deep Langstroth. Brood and a half just means it's 2 different size boxes in the brood area. Big strong colony. They are attacking my camera and they are attacking me. Brood and a half makes it really difficult for me because it means that it's so much harder, more than twice as hard. I would say to find the queen, because when you're looking through the top box, she runs into the bottom box. But we're going to go through, we're going to see if the colony is queen right, and then we're going to try and find that queen. So just going into this colony here, you can see all flying up at me, trying to ping me, trying to sting me on the fingers. Really not nice, aggressive behavior. This is not what you want to see. In this video, we're going to contrast that to what these are going to be like 3 or 4 months later from now once we've requeened them. But good to get an indication of what the behavior is like at the beginning, flying up as soon as I try and get in there with my hive tool. So hopefully you can see that. I'll try and zoom in a bit, but really early indication to show that it's a queen right colony. At least it was in the last couple of days. If we find any cells, then we can deal with that later. But as for the time being, I'm saying we've got a queen in here because I can see freshly laid eggs. So I've not found the queen yet. I've not found any cells upstairs. I've found loads of eggs. I'm certain there's a queen in here. So now it's just a case of going through and finding that queen. If you want to requeen an angry colony, You have to find the queen. If you can't find her, I can link you out to another video at the end, which is a really foolproof way of doing it, but it makes the bees so angry. So best off just trying to go through, taking your time. If you can't do it on day 1, just put them all back together again, come back another day, preferably when they're on a flow, preferably in the middle of the day when all of the angry bees are out the way. There is a queen in this colony. You need to find her. You need to kill her. So there's the queen. Made it really easy for me 'cause it's marked white, 2021 queen. Healthy looking queen, healthy looking colony. Healthy looking queen, healthy looking colony. And I take no pleasure in doing this whatsoever, but unfortunately we need to kill this queen to turn this colony queenless and then give it 8 days for it to become hopelessly queenless. So here it goes. I'm just going to pick that queen up, squish the queen, and that queen is now completely dead. Just make sure she's completely squished, put her out of her misery. And there we go. That is one dead queen. So we'll just discard of that queen now. That's the worst bit out of the way. I'm sorry, that little bee's gone to check up on her. Like, I, I feel terrible doing this. I hate killing queens. It's the worst part of beekeeping. But when the bees are angry, when the bees are horrible, you've got no other way out other than to kill that queen. And it's just one of those things that you have to do as a beekeeper. So as I said, I hate doing that. Really, really don't like doing it. But this colony now is queenless. Do not confuse that with hopelessly queenless. I know people will get really bored about me drumming on about hopelessly queenless, but In order to get a successful introduction, your colony needs to be hopelessly queenless. This colony here is only queenless, and that means that they have the resources to produce their own queen. We're going to take advantage of that now to make sure that we go through all the steps to make sure that they're hopelessly queenless. And it's a really, really simple process. All you do, put everything back together again exactly the same way that it is. I'm going to put my queen excluder back in the correct position, go away from brood and a half. And then in 8 days' time, I'm gonna come back, go through all the colony, everywhere where the queen had access to lay eggs, and there will be emergency cells everywhere. That is the bees' emergency response to try and give themselves a new queen. And then what we're gonna do on day 8 is we're gonna knock down all of those emergency cells, and then on day 8, they will be hopelessly queenless. We'll then add in our mated queen, F1 Buckfast, nice calm queen, and we'll give them maybe 24, 48 hours just to get used to her. And then we'll pop the fondant tab, leave them 7 days, and then we'll come back and that will be a successful introduction. I've never ever lost a queen doing it that way when the colony has been hopelessly queenless. So let's put everything back together again. We're gonna get this angry colony of bees and make sure it's super calm going forward.
