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How do you actually go about doing it? Most books tell you simply to find the old queen, kill her, and introduce your young queen in the mailing cage she came in. Fine, you think. Until you go out to look through your (strong) (aggressive) (agitated) colony for the queen. And knowing that you have your valuable, newly- arrived queen sitting in the house just waiting to be installed!
So this message will be mostly devoted to giving you a method of introducing new queens to your hives without ever having to look for the old queen. And like any such system, it is not foolproof. It works for me and for many other beekeepers, but if it doesn't for you, first make sure you are following directions. Then consider special problems you might have, especially as they relate to the 'golden rules' of queenless, well-fed, with plenty of young bees.
The system I will describe is not new, and it was not my idea. It's a combination of all sorts of ideas. Its the sort of management technique that develops when you have a fair idea of what you want to do, but you're not sure how. Then, rather than just making up your system, you sit back and think about bee behaviour and try to work effectively within the bounds of the ways bees will *usually* respond to certain stimuli.
The object of the system is to create a nucleus colony on top of the old colony. I wanted a system that could be easily used by hobbyist or commercial beekeeper alike, without ever looking for the queen. It should be versatile, both in being able to deal with colonies of differing strengths and with end results. That is, the resulting nucleus, or top, can be used to re-queen with or to start a new colony. The method should use a minimum of extra equipment, and no exotic or complicated gadgets (much as I like them...)
They are based around beekeeping systems that use two full depth brood chambers for most of the year. The system introduces a third box, which is of the same depth as the brood chamber boxes. After all is complete, you'll want to work this extra box 'out', especially if you (1) use different depth boxes for storing/extracting surplus and/or (2) you are particular about using white comb only (never used for brood rearing) as honey supers.
The only 'extra' piece of equipment needed is a split board, also known as a division board. To those of you who may not know what that is, it is simply a hive mat (inner cover) that has had a notch cut out of the rim on one side so as to form an entrance for a colony set above it. The notch can be anywhere from 20 to 100 mm wide; I prefer to have mine about 50 mm, making it large enough for a fairly strong unit but still small enough that the bees can protect it while the colony is still small.
I have modified the inner covers on all of my hives in this manner. Just to try something new this last autumn, I turned them over on my hives in an effort to give some sort of upper ventilation. I'm not really sure how much good it did.
You will also need a queen excluder. As I have one of these for each hive as a matter of course, that is no problem. One last piece of equipment needed will be another box of drawn comb.
Now, after all that prelude, let's see how the system works. For the sake of beginning, let us assume that it is springtime and your colony is housed in two boxes and you want to simply re-queen it. As you'll see later, you have other options, but let's start from this basic case.
When you open your hive, you'll find most of the brood and bees in the upper box. Remove three frames of brood, both sealed and unsealed, from the centre of the brood nest. Take a glance over them first to see if you can spot the queen. Now that you're starting on a method that means you don't have to find her, its amazing how often you will! Then shake all of the bees off of them, back into the colony.
You needn't shake off every last one of them, so long as you are sure that the queen is not one of the bees remaining. Now, place these three frames into the middle of the box of combs you have brought with you.
If there are plenty of stores in the parent colony, take two good frames of honey, shake the bees from them, and place them in the new box with the three frames of brood. If there is not much honey in the hive, you will have to feed either the parent hive, the nucleus, or in the worst case, both.
Now, you can start to re-build the hive. Replace all the frames you have taken from the parent colony with empty combs, doing your best not to split the brood nest if possible. On top of this second box, place the queen excluder. On top of the excluder, place the new box containing the brood and honey that has had the bees shaken from them.
Put the lid on the hive and go away. Think about what you have just done. You have lifted brood and bees above the excluder. What is going to happen to the brood up there? The pheromones it gives off will attract nurse bees that are down in the main hive up to it. Combining that with the frames of honey, the third box that you have added has quite a 'pull' to bring bees up into it. But remember, there is a queen excluder between the boxes, so there is no way the old queen can come up there.
After about 20 minutes, if you go back to the hive and lift the lid, you will find that enough bees have come up into the nucleus to take care of the brood, defend the colony and take care of your new queen.
All you have to do now is replace the queen excluder with the division board and presto! You have your nucleus colony ready for introducing the young queen. It is queenless (because the queen couldn't come up through the excluder). It has plenty of young bees (because they have come up to take care of the brood you lifted). And it has plenty of food (because you provided them with two frames of honey). All the conditions have been met for ideal queen introduction. You can expect that some of the bees will drift back to the main colony, but the young bees taking care of the brood will most likely remain - the new unit shouldn't drop in bee strength too drastically.
This system could be used on a larger number of hives. By the time the beekeeper has worked through the yard, shaking bees from brood and honey to lift into the new box, the first hive would have been left long enough for the bees to come up.
Introduce your young queen into the top and wait a week. Don't disturb them in this time if at all possible; until the new queen is established and laying fully, the bees haven't really fully accepted her. Disturb them during this period and it is possible for them to turn on her.
After a week, you will have a parent colony on the bottom, only slightly reduced in strength by the bees, brood and honey you took. And you will have a nucleus colony headed by a young queen above the split board, all set for your next decision.
You can either use it to re-queen the parent colony, or you could place it on its own floor to use for increasing your colony numbers. If you choose the second option, it would be best if you actually moved it several miles away to avoid the loss of field strength through drifting.
If you want to re-queen the parent colony, you could now go through it, looking for the old queen, preparing to unite the two colonies by replacing the split board with a sheet of newspaper for them to chew their way through. But that would defeat the whole point, wouldn't it? We're supposed to be doing this without ever looking for a queen, aren't we?
If you can go through and find the old queen, aided by any tricks/knacks you might have to quickly locate queens, so much the better. You're certain of results then.
But, believe it or not, you have the odds of success heavily in your favour if you simply newspaper the two units together without looking for the old queen at all. In almost 90% of the cases, if you unite two colonies with the young queen on the top of an old queen, the young queen will be left to head the resulting hive.
Why this happens is open to argument. Some beekeepers will tell you that the bees always select the best of the two queens. I doubt that. My explanation goes along the lines of the young queen's bees are confined in the top box when you replace the split board with newspaper. As well, her field bees returning cannot use their normal entrance, the slot on the split board. They then drift down to the main colony entrance. As they are foragers returning with a load, they will be accepted without causing outrageous fighting at the hive entrance. I think the old queen is then probably killed by the 'scissor' effect of bees foreign to her coming at her from both directions - down as the bees confined above the newspaper chew through and move down in the hive, and up by the foragers from the top unit coming in through the bottom entrance and finding a 'strange' queen in 'their' hive.
It has certainly worked for me, and if the thought of trying to find queens is an impossible one for you, the system might be worth considering. You might just want to experiment with it to see if the time savings will repay the small amount of uncertainty involved.
It's not the answer to all of a beekeepers problems, but it just gives you an idea how by thinking a little bit about bee behaviour, you can sort out your management system to make your life a little easier while doing all you can in the interests of maximum production.
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