Laurence Edwards introduces a mated queen with a broken leg into a colony using a Demeray split and slow-introduction protocol. He explains why defects slip through quality checks, discusses the high risk of supersedure due to her injury, and promises to update viewers on whether she survives.
Today I'm going to introduce a mated queen to a colony, but my queen has got a broken leg. Hi, I'm Lawrence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. I feel really bad whenever I get a queen in a batch and there's something wrong with her, and, and it does happen occasionally. Obviously, whenever the queens come into us, the mated queens that we sell on our website, We check them, we make sure they're okay before we send them out, and occasionally we find one that's got a little bit of damage. Now that damage can happen in the post, or maybe it got missed somewhere along the line. The queen that I've got today though has got a broken leg, and what I'm going to do in this video is I'm going to install that queen into a colony and I'm going to see how long it takes for them to supersede her. Now I guess this is a little bit of an ode to Yolanta, who is the person who reared these queens. I know that when she has queens and there's little defects on them, she doesn't send them out and she nurses them and she keeps them in her own colonies. And some of them go on and on and on, and the bees just carry on like there's nothing wrong with the queen whatsoever. Sometimes I guess they supersede her straight away. I am interested to see what is going to happen with this queen. So I've got a mated queen, she's got a broken leg. I'm going to introduce her into a colony and we're going to see how long it takes the bees To supersede her. Will it be 1 week? Will it be 1 month? Will it be 1 year? Will it be 5 years? I don't know, but I'm really, really interested to find out. So I'm just going to do a quick video. I'll show you the queen, I'll show you her leg, I'll get her introduced into a colony, and then later on in the year I will give you an update on this queen, hopefully to show you that she's been introduced successfully. Let's see what the brood pattern is like. Queen with a broken leg, surely she can't lay as many eggs as a queen without a broken leg. And And let's see how long it takes to supersede her. So I'll get my jacket on, I'll get my smoker on, I'll go and make a split, introduce the queen. Let's see what this queen can do with a broken leg. So here's my queen. You can see that bottom right leg, as you can see it here, that is broken. She's not moving that around at all well. You can see it again there, static in that picture. But apart from that, the queen looks good. I know the attendants don't look too healthy in here, but you can see her dragging that leg around. I think this queen is going to be all right. I'd be very surprised if they killed her straight away, but you can see there the leg is definitely broken. So let's get this queen, we'll put her into a colony, we'll get her introduced, and hopefully they will accept her and not supersede her straight away.
Right, so amazingly, every single colony in this apiary is queen right. Could not believe that because I've had such issues in this apiary with taking queens out, making splits, doing whatever I need to do. But I've just been through every single colony, hence why they're buzzing around me a little bit, and every single colony is queen right. So for this queen with a broken leg, I'm going to make her up her very own split. You've seen it before, making splits in the same apiary. I won't go through it all again. I'll send you out to the video here, but I'll just quickly run through make up a Split for the queen with the broken leg. So hey, how quick was that? I've made a split. All I've done is I've taken the Demeray top from another colony. If you don't know what a Demeray split is, it's when you take the brood nest, you put it up top, take the queen, leave her downstairs to build her own brood nest. I'll send out a link how to do a Demeray split as well. Beauty of Demeray split tops like this though is there's loads of stores, there's loads of brood, there's definitely no queens. They're hopelessly queenless, so they're really easy to introduce queens to. I will get some drift, so I'm going to shake some bees off some of the supers into here. I'll block the entrance up as well, only partially block it, see if I can get a few to reorientate back to here, and then I'm going to put my queen with the broken leg in here, and that's how I'm going to make my split. So, standard super of bees from the same hive, obviously. Shake those in. Lots of bees. I'll put this one back now. Same again with this super, just shake them in. You want to overstock it to the nth degree because 90% of them are just going to fly back anyway. So there we go, simple as that. I've made my split. You will get drift back, but it doesn't matter. I'm happy to get a little bit of drift. There's not a huge amount of brood in here, about 2 or 3 frames, really good emerging brood. They are going to be primed to accept it, but I'm going to go through the normal stages. I'll pop the queen in, I'll wait 8 days, come back, see if there's any cells, take down the cells, release the cage. You know the drill by now. Wait another 7 days, come back, hopefully she'll be introduced. Obviously there's more of a risk than normal because I'm introducing a defective Queen. She's got a broken leg, but I reckon she's going to get accepted because these guys are going to be desperate. I'm going to take my queen, broken leg. I'll pop her in here. Slow introduction, and then we'll come back and we'll see how she's getting on. So that's it for the video. I know it's a really short one. I just wanted to show you what I was doing on that. I promise though, I will keep you up to date on how this queen gets on. I know Yolanta would be really happy about this, so hopefully she can take a look at it as well. I'm sure she will approve of us trying to save the defective queens that come to us. I will be perfectly honest, if they reject her because she's got a broken leg, I will also do a follow-up video, see if we can find her somewhere on the bottom board as well. I do not know how it's going to go. Stick your comments below though. Do you think she's going to survive? Do you think she's going to get superseded? Or do you think they're just going to reject her straight away and kill her? Let me know in the comments below. But 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.
