Introducing a Queen

Most people are aware that there can only be one queen in the hive. The queen is the only bee that can lay eggs, so every bee born in the hive is a child of the queen. The queen also provides a pheromone that 'identifies' the colony - they all smell of their queen!

If we take a queen (or any bee for that matter) from one hive, and place her in another, they will almost certainly kill her - they can smell she doesn't belong to them.

So we have to 'introduce' a queen to the hive!

We put the queen in a queen cage, made out of plastic or wood and mesh, along with some attendant worker bees to look after her. The cage has a door plugged with sugar candy. It takes the bees quite a few days to eat through the candy. By which time the new queen's 'smell' has permeated through the colony. They now believe she's their queen (in reality she has made them smell of her!)

It's a strange thing that you can take one of these caged queens and place her on a queenless colony and they might try and sting her. You can put her on a different colony and they will try and feed her! If I am requeening more than one colony I move the caged queens between each colony to try and find a 'match' (I figure the closer the match the more likely they are to accept her)

When she is finally release by the candy plug being eaten, they all smell the same, and (hopefully!) she will be safe. She can then start laying eggs.

If you have a queen that has hatched in an incubator (or you're taking a queen cell to another hive and by chance she hatches) she doesn't smell of an existing hive. When this happens, you can take her up to the entrance of a queenless hive and 'run her in' - she literally walks through the door and says "I hear you need a queen?"

Normally a queenless colony are very happy to have a new queen introduced, because the whole colony will have died out in about six weeks without a supply of new bees. They're funny things though - often they'll accept the new queen, get her to lay some eggs, then make their own queen from these eggs and kill her off!

When you get a badly behaved colony (it does happen), this has come from the queen and the bad boys she has mated with, because they're all the offspring of the queen. We resolve this by removing the queen, leaving them queenless for a while to consider their actions, and then introducing a 'nice' queen. In this case "removing" means unceremoniously squashing her! If they're really nasty bees, sometimes they'll just kill every queen you give them. In this case there's no hope for them. I throw them out the hive, and they have to negotiate a way into another hive!