Hello Ruary & All,

The following is the way we were  told  for a successful European queen
introduction by the Texas bee inspection service at the Austin ABF
convention.

1.  loose the old foragers (as already talked about)

2. Divide  the hive into three nucs and use a push in cage on a frame of
sealed brood to introduce the European queen.

Ruary Additional points.

. On the one occasion that I used this requeening method, I noticed an
immediate improvement in the temper of the whole colony. This means that it
was the pheromones from the bad tempered Queen that were influencing the
temperament of the colony.

Research does not agree with the above.

Temperment of colonies has long been looked at.

 Many beekeepers thought as above 40-50 years ago that if you kill the queen
the hive would instantly settle down as queen pheromones were causing the
aggressive problem.

In the 50's and 60's I used to hear the above theory from beekeepers and
most likely from beekeepers which on occasion killed a nasty queen and it
seemed the hive was better mannered.

Dr. Kerr isolated the genes responsible for aggressive behavior in bees in
the 60's and proved he could take a gentle bee and make the bee aggressive
and also take a AHb and make the bee gentle through breeding.

My opinion would be that the so called nasty hive was not nasty tempered at
all but the beekeeper simply had a bad experience with the hive and so
killed the queen. When the beekeeper reutrned on say a nice sunny day
instead of a cloudy rainy day the bees were better behaved so the above
hypothesis seemed correct as it would seem.


Ruary said:
on other occasions when I have requeened a bad
tempered colony, I have had to wait until the progeny of the new Queen have
emerged before I noticed any difference; thus it was a genetic influence
causing the bad temper

My experience and research goes along with Ruary's above statement. I moved
some rather nasty bees last night and this morning and they still have got
an attitude even though I pinched the head off their matriarch weeks ago.

I never seem to have a problem with aggressive behavior from queens I get
from my breeders but do from supercedure queens from a couple of those
breeders. Have others on the list seen the same thing?

Bob

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