I read with interest your method of introducing the new queen and nucleus
hive and wondered if a strip of mesh over a third or half of the box would
help to introduce the queen by allowing the other bees in the main hive to
"smell" her and adopt her prior to the paper being eaten through, much like
the candy in the cage method.
 
I would appreciate your thoughts as I was interested in breeding my own
queens this year, just for interest and I was pondering the introduction
method.
 
Thanks
 
Paul Roberts
 
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> From: \Dr. Pedro P. Rodriguez <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Installing a new queen
> Date: Saturday, 5 July 1997 5:49
>
> Mark Franklin Almond wrote:
> Dear Mark:
> It depends. If you are installing a commercial queen, the best thing to
> do is to suspend the queen between two frames in the "brood chamber" and
> let the bees free the queen by eating the candy that is keeping her in
> the cage.  By the time that takes to eat the candy, the bees have
> adapted to the pheromones of the new queen and she is "home free."
> I breed most of my queens in nuclei and isolate each queen in a nucleus
> with one or two frames of honey with bees.  When I am ready to introduce
> the new queen into a colony I use the "newspaper method" placing the
> queen with the two frames right above the brood chamber.  If I have
> supers to place above that, I place a newspaper sheet below and above
> the box containing the new queen.  Three days later I go back and check
> to see if the new queen has been accepted and remove the box that
> contained the new queen and the remains of the newspaper.  This two
> methods have
> worked well for me for many years.  I have used another method in which
> the queen is isolated within a wire cage attached to a brood frame.  In
> this case the queen must have been mated before it is inserted into the
> colony because the method depends on the queen beginning to lay while
> she is caged hence the rest of the colony will accept their new queen
> readily when the wire cage is removed.  This method is a little bit more
> complicated and requires a bit more experience.
> I hope that my contribution is clear enough to be of help to you.
> Please do not hesitate to ask me for more details should you be in need
> of more information.
> Best regards.
> Dr. Rodriguez
> Virginia Beach, VA (USA)