How To Re-Queen Your Hive
WHY DO I NEED TO RE-QUEEN?
A queen bee is the only female who is reproductive in a hive of honey bees. She is also the most important bee in the hive.
If you find your hive is not performing as it should be or it has become aggressive, it will need to be re-queened.
Re-queening your hive will prevent swarming and keep the hive more placid.
Young queens help the colony repopulate as well as they help keep diseases and pests out.
A good beekeeping practice is to re-queen every year and the best time to get one is around September-October.
WHY CAN'T I JUST LET MY HIVE RE-QUEEN ITSELF?
Genetics are super important when it comes to the Queen bee in your hive.
Generally when a cell is selected to become a queen bee, it will be a day 1 old grub. If you let them create their own, what they may do is raise a cell that is between 1-3 days old. (This is depending on when the old queen was removed.) This doesn't give your queen the correct nutrition to grow and develop properly. Which becomes the first issue of letting the hive re-queen itself.
Your Queen bee will also be a direct replica of the old one. Meaning all the genes in the hive will be almost the same as the old one. When it is time to go on her mating flight to begin breeding and laying eggs, she will travel between 10 metres - 3 kilometres to do so. To ensure she makes it back safe to the hive she would generally travel 10 metres - 100 metres and mate with 14 drones. This would then give the assumption that she would have mated with 14 drones that have come from your hive. This makes your new Queen bee interbred and makes the genes for your hive even worse. Which is another reason we do not let your hive re-queen itself.
Once the queen has started laying and the hive gets stronger, she will begin to fail her duties of being a Queen bee. (e.g. laying patchy brood, drone laying instead of workers, etc) She will also stop telling the hive what to do. This then creates a cranky, angry hive. No beekeeper ever wants to be scared of going into the hive, afraid they may get stung 100 times for just walking outside into your backyard. The process of swarming and self re-queening will then happen again (approx every 6 months or so) and repeats frequently during spring and summer. Which is a major reason we do not recommend your hive re-queening itself.
If you take the time to buy a queen from a breeder/Queen bee onseller (e.g us - Beekeeping Supplies Australia) it will help stop the hive from being agressive, it will gather more honey and should stop swarming for approx 12 months. (As long as there are enough honey super boxes on your hive - run 2 honey boxes, 1 brood box & you are taking honey as they fill it. Or the conditions aren't poor and the bees are starving.)
If you still aren't convinced, we recommend if you have multiple hives, re-queen one hive and leave the rest and see the difference a queen from a breeder makes. From our commercial beekeeping background, it makes a significant difference in production.
HOW DO I RE-QUEEN MY HIVE?
Ensure that you find and dispose of the old queen first, before putting the new queen in.
Our queen bees are provided in a queen cage with queen candy.
This queen cage is placed in-between two strong frames of brood.
The bees from the inside of the cage as well as the outside will then chew out and eat the queen candy. Creating a pathway for the queen to get out.
This takes 3 days. Do not disturb the bees during this process as it will effect acceptance rates.
After 3 days, go back into your hive. The queen should be out of the cage. If the queen is still in the cage, open it up and let her out manually. Then take the cage away.
After 7 days the queen should start to lay and resume as normal. Make sure you open up the hive and check to see if she has started laying. If she has started laying she has been accepted into the hive.
Please note that hives may not always accept new queens. It ultimately depends on the conditions at the time. Don’t let this intimidate you if it happens. All you will need to do is repeat the process again.
WHAT DOES A QUEEN BEE LOOK LIKE?
