After reading a glowing article in Bee Culture about Jennifer Berry and her excellent queen rearing program, we have decided to replace the queens in both our hives with queens from Jennifer Berry.
Why requeen? What is most important to me is the bees display what is called hygenic behavior. This means they keep the hive clean, and because of this hygenic behavior, the varroa mite population is lower.
Many beekeepers requeen every year or every two years. Queens don't last much longer on their own. The BeeAnonymous blog lists a few reasons:
* Older queens are more prone to swarming
* Replacing a failing queen
* Better stock traits like pest and disease resistances
* And in my case, improving bad attitudes
Our hive at the Maple Knoll Farm did amazing for its first year, giving us a few frames of honey to harvest. We opted to leave the majority of the honey in the hive, and also fed both our hives a lot of sugar syrup to get them through the hard winter we have up here in NW CT. Our bees are not aggressive, but we do want a to improve the stock of our bees, as we don't want to have to use miticides to combat the varroa mite and tracheal mites.
Feeding bees sugar syrup in the fall to prepare them for winter
The hive that is in our yard, which is in a shed to protect it from bears, did not do nearly as well last year as our hive at Maple Knoll Farm. I checked on them last month and I think I heard them in the hive. This hive will benefit from a new queen.
The hive in our shed, wrapped with a insulating blanket and a polystyrene outer cover
Our hive at Maple Knoll may not need a new queen. The hive was great last year, and we saw them doing cleansing flights in 38 F degree weather. And whenever we went to check on them, the hive was alive with energy, tons of bees coming and going.
So I am thinking that we may split this hive. A split is where you take some of the bees from a healthy hive, some frames of brood, eggs, and pollen, and place them in a new hive with a new queen. A split allows you to populate a new hive without buying a package of bees, and it allows you to choose where your queen comes from. I've been reading up on how to divide or split a hive and I think we can do it.
Maple Knoll bees on cleansing flights
I do believe the queen in the Maple Knoll hive has been replaced by the bees. This may be a natural thing, or it may have been due to us being clumsy when working the hive. We weren't always good at pulling out the first frame, making room to pull the other frames up and out. We may have killed the queen, as we did find what we think were opened queen cells on a few frames in the middle of the summer. Finding this queen will be a challenge, since she was not raised by humans, she is not marked on her body for easy identification.
Finding the queen in thousands of bees can be hard
To requeen a hive:
• Find and remove the existing queen.
• Wait a day if you can.
• Put in the new queen ( in her queen cage) in the hive between 2 frames, make sure the sugar plug is pointing up so no dead attendants can plug up her exit, poke a small hole in the sugar plug to get the bees to eat through it.
• Leave the hive alone for a week.
Our new queens arrive in May, we'll make a GardenFork Show when we do the re-queening. Jennifer Berry's Queens are only available through Brushy Mountain Bee Farm.
Beekeepers: what can you add to this post? Please comment below.
Gilman
So you want to replace your winter tested queens with some queens that come from Georgia that you don't know how will do in CT winter?
I would not recommend. Queens can perform more than 2 years and if they survive the winter and Varroa you need those queens around. By replacing them you getting rid of good genes.
Gilman
Eric Gunnar Rochow
yes. our shed hive is did poorly last year, and we will probably split the healthy hive, and want to use a Linda Berry queen for that split.
Gilman
I thought that you are going to requeen, which means replacing the existing queens.
Eric Gunnar Rochow
yes, we are. we will re-queen the hive that is in our yard. we call that hive the Shed Hive. It did not do well.
And i do see your thinking on why remove queens that have proved winter hardy.
Our current queens, which came with our bee packages, came from Georgia as well, so the thinking is the new queens will do well in the cold
thx for the comments, i'm always learning from other people
geremy
i was under the assumption that swarming was how bee's reproduce in the spring the old queen takes some workers and takes off to a new home leaveing to old hive to re-queen its self...so u might not have killed you queen they could have just swarmed? and woundent u take the old queen and move it a new hive instead of leaing the old queen in the old hive and takeing workers and putting them with a new queen? not an expert ether just putting what ive read here thanks for the great vids btw!
leo
hey Eric great videos for beginners, i always check to see if you posted new ones i am a new beekeeper myself but i was wondering where did u get your entrance reducer that you have on your hive at maple knoll farm. Looking forward for your new beekeeping videos 2010.