Requeening, queens replacement

The video shows queen replacement (requeening) in WindowBee hives. But there are a lot of information useful for the conventional beekeeping also. Some interesting behavior of workers shows the attitude of the swarm towards to the new queen. That’s all help us to predict our success or defeat with requeening proces. In many cases we can avoid the problems if we decide to watch our bees thoroughly. There was shown two ways: one with freshly orphaned colony and other with two weeks earlier – It is a huge difference between them…One thing needs to be discus – what wasn’t show in video:Very important is remove the workers from queen transport cage. They can increase aggressive reactions of bees from orphaned colony against new additional queen.

The way of requeening showed in this video is very efficient. But some times we have a very valuable mother queen and aggressive bees towards to her. In that cases we can act this way:

To be sure of success all workers in this process should stay in the hive. So we work at night when all members of the colony stay in it. This pattern is 100% successful but we have to know that the life span of workers treated with CO2 is ca 25% shorter than normal. And it’s not recommended way of act later than in July. Simply saying we can deprive the diapause of workers which will overwintering and die before winter. If we decide go this pattern in autumn we have to remember to bolster bee colony by addition new workers (or even better – some pupas) from other colony later – when new queen will be accepted.

Act this way :

• Make sure there is no any queen in the hive , if there is a queen remove it.
• Connect the hive to the bottle with CO2. (You have to borrow it or buy – it’s not expensive)
• Turn on the gas flow to the hive, the flow should be adequate to the hive volume – so the bees should became immobilized in 30-45 sec.
• When bees became immobilized we put the new queen in to the hive.
• When queen fall in to the sleep , we close the CO2 flow and waiting. Awaken bees will accept new queen.