Beekeeper Laurence Edwards finds a failing queen in a declining hive and kills her to save the colony. He replaces her with a healthy mated queen using a rapid requeening technique that skips the usual waiting period, expecting the hive to rebuild in the coming weeks.
There she is. Really sorry, but I have to do this, and she is now dead. Backstory on this colony here is we went in early in the year, saw a cluster there. End of last season, we tried to requeen. I think that requeening failed, but I just don't know. In this video, I'm going to go in, pull some frames out, see if we can find the queen, see if we can identify the queen as the one that I requeened them with, see if there's 2 queens knocking around in there, which there seems to be in quite a lot of the ones that I overwintered where they insisted on superseding late on in the season. And we'll just generally take a look and see how the Zest Hive's getting on going into 2023. Shrinking clusters like this at this point of the year indicate one thing to me, and that is a failing queen. They either starve and they die— they're not dead, so they're not starving— or there's a failing queen and they're dwindling away. If I had to take a punt, I would say the colony in here is failing and failed to mate late on in the season. Well, this is really frustrating. When I looked at them previously a few weeks ago, it looked like a nice-sized cluster. And the fact that it's shrunk, I just know what I'm going to find in here. We're going to find a failed queen and we're going to find drone brood. I'd love for them to prove me wrong, but I really do fear for the worst. Definitely no issue with any stores, tons of stores left over. This colony is only going one way. And there we go, simple as that. Drone laying queen. And remarkably, on that side of the frame there, I've just found the queen as well. So this is going to be really easy. We're fixing another drone-laying queen colony. Might just about get this one through, but this queen is definitely going to have to be squished. There she is. Really sorry, but I have to do this. And she is now dead. So one dead queen. Really sorry. Always horrible thing to do, but she would have caused all of those bees there to die if I hadn't tried to fix her. And when I say fix her, I do mean kill her and replace her. Now, luckily for me, I do have lots of mated queens available at this time of the year. And this will fix this colony completely. And it'll probably dwindle down for a little bit, but it will build back up 'cause there's enough bees to be able to build it back up. If this was like a palm full of bees, I wouldn't bother, but I don't want to have to cut out all the bees from my Zest hive, so I am going to requeen. So really simple. All you do, you just pop the caps on the cages. You pop both of the caps on these white cages here. So it should look something like that. And then we're going to take this queen and put it into the colony. Now, because that was a drone-laying queen, there's going to be no viable larva for them to create new queen cells from. So they are, now that I've taken the queen out, they are immediately hopelessly queenless, hence why I can pop the tab without waiting 8 days. I'm just going to take this queen now, pop it in there, and I'm going to leave them for a week. Hopefully we come back and we will see eggs. So there we go, I've got the queen in there now. I tried to requeen this colony back end of last year. It clearly failed because there was a virgin running around. She's not got mated, the colony's turned drone laying, and now we've got a last ditch attempt to try and fix it. Fingers crossed we can make it work.
