On Sat, 29 Nov 2008 10:37:03 +1100, Geoff Manning <[log in to unmask]> 
wrote:


>
>A mate in Victoria (Australia) just places the cell into the hive without
>removing the old queen.                                                 

Always looking for better/faster ways to requeen I asked a person that 
sells nucs how he requeened all of his hives.  He said he doesn't find the 
old queen just puts on a queen excluder between honey supers and brood 
chambers and puts the cell in the honey super.  I tried this for four 
years and the bees destroyed the cell before it hatched.
 I had to move a bunch of really heavy three deep hives this spring that 
had to be hand carried out of where they were.  I went in and made three 
to four nucs out of each one(didn't find any of the queens even though 
they were marked) moved them, put a queen cell in each one including the 
nucs, and all the queen cells hatched in nucs and hives. never found a 
marked queen, all had new eggs at the same time.

So I'm going to try it again this year, I suspect that the removal of the 
nucs made the bees think that the queen was failing, but will see if 
repeatable.  If it does I will have to see how much brood I have to remove 
to trigger it because I missed the early flow's.

mike bassett syracuse n.y.

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