Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey walks through requeening a colony with a mated queen. Remove the old queen, wait eight days for emergency cells to form, destroy them all, then cage the new queen between brood frames. After 48 hours open the cage, leave it alone for a week, then check for eggs. Queens may take two to three weeks to start laying.
In this video, I'm going to show you how to requeen a colony using a mated queen. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. In this video, I'm going to show you how to requeen a colony using a mated queen. Now, requeening colonies and introducing queens is very easy and very simple. I'm going to condense all of the steps down to 5 minutes in this video and you'll be able to follow it from the beginning to the end. The first thing you need to do is you need to make sure the colony is hopelessly queenless. So you do that by removing the queen, waiting 8 days. The queen will turn any larva that's available to them into emergency queen cells, and then you have to go back in, take down those emergency queen cells, and then you've got a colony that hasn't got a queen and they haven't got any resources to create their own queen. Only then can you get a successful introduction. Now you can do that step before your queen arrives, or you can do it when your queen arrives, and it really doesn't make a massive difference. If you want to know how I do it, I do it when the queen arrives. So that's what I'm going to do in this video, and I'm going to show you the exact process that I use to introduce queens. So there's no better way to learn than actually seeing it in action. So I'll get my bee suit on, I'll get into the bees, and I'll show you how to requeen a colony using using a mated queen. So this is the colony that we're going to requeen. We'll get inside now, find the queen, and make them queenless. So I'm going to take that queen, I'm going to pop her off into a nuc because there's nothing wrong with this colony. We're going to leave the colony completely queenless for 8 days, and then we're going to come back and see if they've made emergency cells, which they will do every single time. Fast forward 8 days and see what the status of the colony is So 8 days later, what you will start to see popping up are these here, and these are emergency cells. Now inside there, there is a queen, and it will be a virgin queen that emerges. You need to go through every single frame of the colony, and I would suggest shaking off the bees. You just need to go through, take every single one out, and get rid of them. So at this point, I do suggest go through your colony, get your best bee suit on, get your gloves on, Shake off every single frame. There's no queen in there, it doesn't matter. You're requeening with a mated queen, so it doesn't matter that you're shaking the frames that have got queen cells on. Shake off every frame, examine it all over, get every single queen cell off. So this colony of bees, a little bit angry because I've been shaking frames. This colony is now hopelessly queenless. We removed that queen, we waited 8 days, We came back, we took down all of the emergency cells. They are now hopelessly queenless. There's no way for them to create a queen on their own, and this is how you get such good introduction rates. Only at this point do you introduce the queen to the colony and pop the cage. So at this stage, you want to take a mated queen in a cage like this one here. Make sure that the tab is still sealed. Really, really important. And then you want to take that cage and pop that in between 2 brood frames like that. So this is what the colony looks like now. We've got a hopelessly queenless box of bees and an introduction cage popped in between the 2 frames. We're going to fast forward now 48 hours and we're going to come back and we're going to pop that tab. Right, so 48 hours later, we're back here and we're going to pop the tab on this cage. It's really important, this one. Don't pop the cage too early. Get them hopelessly queenless, put the cage in with it still sealed, give it 48 hours, then pop the cage, and then you'll get a really good introduction. So popping the cage is really, really simple. On this end of the cage here is sometimes quite well hidden, but there is a little tab there. All I'm going to do is quickly pop that off so you've got access into the fondant. Really easy to pop the cages. Just get your hive tool in there, take it like that, you get a little plastic tab that comes off, and then you've got full access to the fondant. So we'll pop this cage back in now. 7 days is what I recommend to leave the colony alone now. Let the bees work through the fondant, which they'll probably do in a few hours, but patience is key here. Give them the time. Hopefully you'll come back 7 days later, you'll see the queen walking around the frame, Eggs in the cells and you've successfully requeened your colony. So I'll pop this cage back in now, close the colony back up, and I'll fast forward 7 days. Right, so 7 days later, we're back to this colony here. I'm going to take the cage out now, and you can see from this image here, the cage is completely empty. Let's get into the colony and see if we can find that queen. And there we go, that's the queen walking around the frames. We've had a successful introduction. If you take a look in the cells, you can see eggs. Always nice to see eggs, but don't worry if you don't see eggs for the first 2 or 3 weeks. The queens don't always lay straight away, so you can have a queen walking around on the frame and it takes her a couple of weeks just to get into the swing of things. If it's raining or the colony doesn't want to expand, They won't necessarily start laying eggs immediately, so just give them two to three weeks to lay eggs. And that's it. We've done a successful introduction of a mated queen, and we've requeened this colony. I hope you found that useful. If you need queens throughout the season, we stock both UK mated queens and F1 Buckfast queens as well. You can buy them on our website, www.blackmountainhoney.co.uk, and they're available on next day delivery. 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.
