Laurence Edwards finds his artificially inseminated queen being superseded after just three to four weeks. The colony raised a virgin queen, likely because the new queen hasn't produced enough pheromone yet. Edwards cages the original queen to let the daughter develop and mate, then will monitor whether the colony accepts her.
Right, today we're in the middle of a supersedure of an artificially inseminated queen. I put an artificially inseminated queen in this colony about three or four weeks ago now. Released that queen. Hopefully they're not doing this across all these colonies here because I've got twelve artificially inseminated queens in this apiary. I've opened it up to do another video. I found a single supersedure cell and I found a supersedure queen walking around on the frames. How annoying is this? Luckily, I found it in time. Let me quickly get the camera, show you both of the queens. queens, the original artificially inseminated queen and also the new virgin that's just come out of the supersedure cell. So there's my queen, artificially inseminated. She's been laying up loads of nice frames, really good quality, pure artificially inseminated queen. She's still in there, accepted by the bees, but they are trying to supersede her. So you can see on the frame there, classic supersedure cell. Doesn't matter where it is, but it's one single cell in the colony and the queens should live side by side. I opened up this colony and this virgin here was literally just that second coming out. Absolutely incredible to catch it with the timing like that. I'm gonna have to go through all the colonies here because this would be happening on more than one. I'm a bit gutted that they're trying to supersede, but that is the risk with artificially inseminated queens. You need to give them a couple of rounds of brood just to get them to a point they're not going to try and do it. But there we go, one virgin supersedes a queen, and my artificially inseminated queen has gone for a walk downstairs. Right, so what am I going to do? Sounds really horrible, and I wouldn't do this at any other point throughout the season, but I'm just running out of stuff at the moment because I'm going through a big cleaning and purging process. I'm going to squish the virgin. I'm really sorry, that's what I'm going to do. Hopefully, once they get a couple of rounds of brood with that artificially inseminated queen, it means that they're not going to try and continue superseding her. I'll come back in 10 days and check again just to see whether they've made any new cells. That supersedure isn't as a result of anything wrong with the artificial queen. It's as a result of them building their pheromone, and until you get enough of the brood and until that queen comes into lay sufficiently to build up her pheromone, they think something's wrong with her and they're trying to supersede her. I've got tons of frames of brood there, tons of eggs, nothing wrong with that queen, but really interesting to see 2 queens in a single colony. Ah, I actually cannot bring myself to do it, so I'm scratching that. I'm going to cage the artificially inseminated queen, And I'll give this F1 daughter a chance to mate late on in the season. We'll do an update in about 4 weeks, so first week of October, last week of September, we'll come back and we'll see if that daughter got mated. For the time being though, change of plan, I'm gonna cage the queen, I'll use her elsewhere, and we'll see what this supersedure daughter can do.
