The Value of Requeening

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This article appeared under my pseudonym, Skep, in the NZ Beekeeper No 195, Spring 1987, pp 23-25.

The short answer is that we are beekeepers, not bee-havers. By taking on the hobby of beekeeping, we are saying that through management and manipulation, we can help the colony in its job of gathering a honey crop.

And to remind you of what I said in the last column, at its most basic, good beekeeping consists of having a good young queen heading the colony, feeding it when necessary and giving it enough room to expand naturally.

Commercial beekeepers admit the value of having young queens heading their hives, even when they do not get around to replacing them as often as they might wish. They are often limited by such things as cash flows, difficulty of supply for large numbers of queens and the monumental task of replacing queens in a large number of hives. But the key point to remember is that all successful beekeepers will tell you of the value of young queens.

The cost of a young queen seems quite a barrier. After all, $10 for a single bee! In fact, that cost should not deter you at all. Balance the cost against the benefits. On the bottom line, let's look at honey production.

The $10 that you pay for a young queen is only the value of about 2 to 3 frames of honey. In all but the very worst of seasons, I think it would be fair to say that a young queen heading the hive will increase production by more that that! The difference is more often a full box of honey.

And its not just that bottom line difference, either. Keeping a young queen in your hive will make management so much easier and predictable. The hive will not have anywhere near the same tendency to swarm. Though there are a lot of factors that affect swarming, including overcrowding, weather and so forth, the age of the queen is a primary cause.

A hive headed by a young queen will develop steadily, rearing the maximum number of foragers to gather your honey crop. Unlike an old queen, the young queen will not be likely to suddenly fail just at a critical time.

So how old is old? Remember, queens might live for 5 years or even more. In a practical sense, most beekeepers will tell you to try to have all your queens less than two years old. This does not say that queens are no good after two years, but it does say that they will be less likely to perform well. As a hobbyist beekeeper, I would advise requeening at least every other year, and if you want maximum production, requeening every year if you can arrange it.

For many people, the stumbling blocks to requeening regularly are two -- Difficulty in getting queens when you want them and difficulty in finding the old queen to replace her.

For the first of these I can offer only one piece of advice. Order early. By this, I don't mean just a week or two before you want the queens. I mean months before you require them. There is a tremendous demand placed on queen breeders for supply in the months of September and October. Everyone wants their queens at that same time. If the weather is not good at that time, it means the queens won't be able to mate properly and the delivery will be late.

If you are going to be able to get these early spring queens from a queen breeder at all, you will have had to order six months or a year in advance. And if you are not getting your spring queens until late November, you're really not getting the best value from them. All the important build up of the colony will have already taken place (or the hive will have already swarmed!).

For this reason, I prefer requeening in the autumn. You still need to order in advance, but supplies are generally a little more reliable. With an increasing export of queens to Canada, this might change somewhat, but for now I have no troubles getting queens in the autumn when I need them. And by autumn, I mean requeening the hive in February and March, not in April and May!

So we've dealt with the argument that a new queen is too expensive. In fact, a young queen will amply repay you for her cost. We've sorted out the argument that its difficult to get queens when you want them. You've simply got to plan well ahead for your needs and order early.

Now we've got to actually get the queen into the hive without having her killed by the bees. And that is indeed another problem entirely.

There are as many methods of looking for queens and replacing queens as there are beekeepers, it would seem. Things that work for some beekeepers (or for some areas) may not always work for others. Though the actual process might differ somewhat, let's look at some of the factors that successful queen introduction methods have in common.

The three 'golden rules' for me are that the colony should be queenless, it should be well fed and it should have young bees emerging.

The first of these should go without saying, really. You can't really introduce your young (foreign) queen to a colony before you manage to get rid of the old queen. Nothing to it, eh? Just go into the colony, find the old queen and squash her between your fingers!

That's right. Just go into that ill-tempered hive with frames all glued up so that you need a spade to remove them, look through those 30 000 bees and find the one that looks different. Nothing to it.

If you are the type of beekeeper who has trouble finding the queen, there are whole articles devoted to helping you. I'll mention only a few of the ideas that have helped me.

I mark my queens with typist correction fluid and once they are marked, there's no trouble at all spotting them. Again, you can find more information about this in other places.

If I am dealing with a large colony, I place a queen excluder between boxes and wait about 5 days. Then when I go looking for the queen, I know at least which box she is in by looking for frames with eggs in them.

I also prefer to introduce young queens into nucleus units. I make up a nucleus with two good frames of brood in all stages, two frames of extra bees and two frames of honey. If you make the unit up a week or so before you expect your new queen to arrive, you can then go back to make sure you didn't accidentally include the old queen. You should also tear down any emergency queen cells the nucleus might have started.

After successfully introducing the young queen to this unit, I can look for the old queen in the parent hive at my leisure over the next few weeks. Once she is found and killed, the nucleus is newspapered on top of the parent colony to reunite them.

And why do I say the colony should be well fed? All I mean is that your chances of successfully introducing a new queen to a hive are reduced when there is no nectar being brought into the hive. If you have had trouble introducing queens in the past, make a point of feeding the hive a splash of sugar syrup several days beforehand. It doesn't need much, just a liter or so. Better yet, give them a splash every few days for a week or two prior to replacing the queen.

The final rule, make sure there are young bees emerging, is one that is very hard to break. One of the hardest queen introduction jobs is to a hive that has gone hopelessly queenless, with all the former queen's brood already emerged.

Rather than risk your new queen in such a hive, you should either make up a nucleus from another hive and introduce the queen into that first, or you should take two or three frames of emerging brood from other hives to add to the broodless hive before introducing the queen.

It makes sense, really. The queen is fed by the young bees that have active brood food glands. If there aren't any such bees in the colony, the chances of a queen being successfully introduced are considerably smaller.

All in all, replacing queens in your hives is one of the most beneficial management techniques you can use. It can make your spring work easier. It can reduce swarming and it can help the colony build up its population in order to collect the maximum crop. It can reduce the stress on the colony, helping it to deal with such diseases as nosema and sacbrood. And if your colony is aggressive, requeening can completely change its temperament, turning beekeeping into the pleasant sideline that it should be.