QUEEN INTRODUCTION IN QUEEN RIGHT COLONIES
By Dan Minnick, Graduate Student, Gainesville
Florida Beekeepers Institute. Papers and speeches. 1966


Annual requeening of bee colonies will generally result in improved hive vigor and higher production. Beekeepers do not follow this practice as often as they should chiefly because of the time and cost involved in finding the old queen in a hive before the new queen can be introduced. If some way could be found whereby a new young queen could be put in a hive with the assurance that she would be accepted by the workers and would eventually replace the old queen then annual requeening would probably become much more popular, resulting in greater yields of honey per colony.

This summer studies were made on the behavior of workers and the old queen in response to introduced virgins and mated queens. Fourteen observation hives were established with old queens at the University of Florida and used in this experiment.

We were interested in learning the response of the worker bees to the introduced queen, the response of the old queen to the new queen, the eventual fate of the introduced queen, and whether smoking the hive prior to introduction of the queens had any effect on the above behavior.

The response to introduced virgin queens was particularly interesting. Immediately upon introduction of a virgin queen three or four workers would investigate her, lick her body and crowd around her, during which time the virgin queen would remain motionless. After three or four minutes these workers wouldbecome more u99ressive and start biting and pulling at the queen. The queen would attempt to escape from them by running over the comb. This behavior pattern of alternating attention and aggression was often repeated two or three times by different workers in different parts of the hive. It always ended by the introduced queen boing balled and killed by the workers. The average time taken to ball an introduced virgin was sixteen minutes for one day old virgins, eight minutes for 5 day old virgins and two minutes for all eight day old virgins.

When mated queens were introduced they were immediately attacked and balled by the worker bees. The average time taken to ball a mated queen was thirty-five seconds, compared with the sixteen minutes for the day old virgins.

When observation hives were smoked prior to the introduction of virgin queens, the survival time was increased from 16 minutes to as long as five hours. This suggests the possibility that a treatment may be developed to prevent an introduced queen being killed before she becomes acclimated with the colony.

One very interesting observation was made. The Iiterature reports that when two queens meet in a hive they will fight until one is killed. In our observations the virgin queens were seen walking over the established queens with no interest being shown in each other. In one case a virgin queen was observed to walk up to and stand on an established queen for several second, then walk away, and return to the queen and walk away again without arousing any antagonism. In this study all 48 introduced queens were killed by the workers, not by the old established queen.

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