On Sat, May 12, 2001 at 06:28:47PM -0400, Barry Sergeant wrote:
> By sheer co-incidence, or luck, I was checking out a hive with an
> extremely valuable queen and found her balled; badly balled. I placed
> her in a cage with five young bees and removed her. She had not been
> injured. Notwithstanding the cause of the balling (most likely: drifting; I
> am busy moving colonies around the countryside) the challenge here
> is reintroduction. After two hours, she went back into the (roaring) hive
> in the cage suspended by wire between two populous brood frames.
> Tomorrow, I plan to place her in a 10cm by 10cm cage made from
> metal mosquito wire. This cage is 15mm deep; 5mm will be sunk into
> wax of cleaned cells, ready for eggs. She will be installed with a few
> young bees in the cage. The idea is that she will be more readily
> re-accepted by the colony if she is laying eggs. If all works out, she will
> be released after three to four days. Is this methodology OK? I simply
> CANNOT lose this queen.
>
I would think a NUC introduction would be safer. Since you already have the
queen you cannot make the NUC up in advance. My thoughts are this:

I would add a hive body above the current bodies and move some frames of brood up
there. Put a queen excluder under this body just in case there is a virgin or
other queen running around in the hive. Let a population of nurse bees get up into
the brood. Now leave the excluder in place and isolate the upper body with newspaper.
Put the cage into the upper area. I would even put a feeder on the hive as a well
fed hive tends to take queens better.


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