Re-queening

I have had two hives that have been very crabby for the last few months and two hives that were either cut-outs or swarms.  These four hives were do for queen replacement.  I picked up four mated queens from a local commercial queen breeder on Saturday morning, May 21st then proceeded to re-queen the hives on Saturday late after noon.

A new queen packed in a small cage is visited by bees from my apiary.

The first step to re-queening is to locate the existing queen and crush her leaving her either on the bottom board or the entrance to the hive so her hive mates know they are queenless.  The lack of queen pheromone in the hive alerts the workers that their queen is missing.

Workers examine the remains of their queen on the entrance to their hive.

This queen had fallen to the ground and is surrounded by her daughters.

The caged queen has a candy plug that the workers must chew through in order to release the new queen form her cage.  A small hole is made in the candy to shorten the time needed for the workers to chew through the candy.  The cage is then wedged between two frames and the hive closed up.  In one to two days the workers will have released the queen.  Check back on the hive in three days to ensure they did release her.  If they accept their new queen she should be laying eggs before a week has passed.  Checking for larvae on the frames will let you know whether she has commenced laying or not.

I was only able to find two of the four queens before light started to fail so I had to re-queen the remaining two hives the following morning.

Searching each of the boxes in one of my hives trying to locate the queen so she can be removed before re-queening.