Summary:  Description of requeening a hive without having to look
for the old queen.  Variation of an article that orginally
appeared in the Beginners Notes column of the NZ Beekeeper
several years ago.
 
REQUEENING WITHOUT LOOKING FOR THE QUEEN by Nick Wallingford
 
One of the big stumbling blocks for many beginner beekeepers is
that problem of how do you actually get the queen into the hive.
The fundamentals -- the colony should be queenless, it should be
well fed and it should have young bees emerging.
 
How do you actually go about doing it?  Most books tell you
simply to find the old queen, kill her, and introduce your young
queen in the mailing cage she came in.  Fine, you think.  Until
you go out to look through your (strong) (aggressive) (agitated)
colony for the queen.  And knowing that you have your valuable,
newly-arrived queen sitting in the house just waiting to be
installed!
 
So this message will be mostly devoted to giving you a method of
introducing new queens to your hives without ever having to look
for the old queen.  And like any such system, it is not
foolproof.  It works for me and for many other beekeepers, but if
it doesn't for you, first make sure you are following directions.
Then consider special problems you might have, especially as they
relate to the 'golden rules' of queenless, well-fed, with plenty
of young bees.
 
The system I will describe is not new, and it was not my idea.
It's a combination of all sorts of ideas.  Its the sort of
management technique that develops when you have a fair idea of
what you want to do, but you're not sure how.  Then, rather than
just making up your system, you sit back and think about bee
behaviour and try to work effectively within the bounds of the
ways bees will *usually* respond to certain stimuli.
 
The object of the system is to create a nucleus colony on top of
the old colony.  I wanted a system that could be easily used by
hobbyist or commercial beekeeper alike, without ever looking for
the queen.  It should be versatile, both in being able to deal
with colonies of differing strengths and with end results.  That
is, the resulting nucleus, or top, can be used to re-queen with
or to start a new colony.  The method should use a minimum of
extra equipment, and no exotic or complicated gadgets (much as I
like them...)
 
They are based around beekeeping systems that use two full depth
brood chambers for most of the year.  The system introduces a
third box, which is of the same depth as the brood chamber boxes.
After all is complete, you'll want to work this extra box 'out',
especially if you (1) use different depth boxes for
storing/extracting surplus and/or (2) you are particular about
using white comb only (never used for brood rearing) as honey
supers.
 
The only 'extra' piece of equipment needed is a split board, also
known as a division board.  To those of you who may not know what
that is, it is simply a hive mat (inner cover) that has had a
notch cut out of the rim on one side so as to form an entrance
for a colony set above it.  The notch can be anywhere from 20 to
100 mm wide; I prefer to have mine about 50 mm, making it large
enough for a fairly strong unit but still small enough that the
bees can protect it while the colony is still small.
 
I have modified the inner covers on all of my hives in this
manner.  Just to try something new this last autumn, I turned
them over on my hives in an effort to give some sort of upper
ventilation.  I'm not really sure how much good it did.
 
You will also need a queen excluder.  As I have one of these for
each hive as a matter of course, that is no problem. One last
piece of equipment needed will be another box of drawn comb.
 
Now, after all that prelude, let's see how the system works.  For
the sake of beginning, let us assume that it is springtime and
your colony is housed in two boxes and you want to simply
re-queen it.  As you'll see later, you have other options, but
let's start from this basic case.
 
When you open your hive, you'll find most of the brood and bees
in the upper box.  Remove three frames of brood, both sealed and
unsealed, from the centre of the brood nest.  Take a glance over
them first to see if you can spot the queen.  Now that you're
starting on a method that means you don't have to find her, its
amazing how often you will!  Then shake all of the bees off of
them, back into the colony.
 
You needn't shake off every last one of them, so long as you are
sure that the queen is not one of the bees remaining. Now, place
these three frames into the middle of the box of combs you have
brought with you.
 
If there are plenty of stores in the parent colony, take two good
frames of honey, shake the bees from them, and place them in the
new box with the three frames of brood.  If there is not much
honey in the hive, you will have to feed either the parent hive,
the nucleus, or in the worst case, both.
 
Now, you can start to re-build the hive.  Replace all the frames
you have taken from the parent colony with empty combs, doing
your best not to split the brood nest if possible.  On top of
this second box, place the queen excluder.  On top of the
excluder, place the new box containing the brood and honey that
has had the bees shaken from them.
 
Put the lid on the hive and go away.  Think about what you have
just done.  You have lifted brood and bees above the excluder.
What is going to happen to the brood up there?  The pheromones it
gives off will attract nurse bees that are down in the main hive
up to it.  Combining that with the frames of honey, the third box
that you have added has quite a 'pull' to bring bees up into it.
 
But remember, there is a queen excluder between the boxes, so
there is no way the old queen can come up there.
 
After about 20 minutes, if you go back to the hive and lift the
lid, you will find that enough bees have come up into the nucleus
to take care of the brood, defend the colony and take care of
your new queen.
 
All you have to do now is replace the queen excluder with the
division board and presto!  You have your nucleus colony ready
for introducing the young queen.  It is queenless (because the
queen couldn't come up through the excluder).  It has plenty of
young bees (because they have come up to take care of the brood
you lifted).  And it has plenty of food (because you provided
them with two frames of honey).  All the conditions have been met
for ideal queen introduction.  You can expect that some of the
bees will drift back to the main colony, but the young bees
taking care of the brood will most likely remain - the new unit
shouldn't drop in bee strength too drastically.
 
This system could be used on a larger number of hives.  By the
time the beekeeper has worked through the yard, shaking bees from
brood and honey to lift into the new box, the first hive would
have been left long enough for the bees to come up.
 
Introduce your young queen into the top and wait a week. Don't
disturb them in this time if at all possible; until the new queen
is established and laying fully, the bees haven't really fully
accepted her.  Disturb them during this period and it is possible
for them to turn on her.
 
After a week, you will have a parent colony on the bottom, only
slightly reduced in strength by the bees, brood and honey you
took.  And you will have a nucleus colony headed by a young queen
above the split board, all set for your next decision.
 
You can either use it to re-queen the parent colony, or you could
place it on its own floor to use for increasing your colony
numbers.  If you choose the second option, it would be best if
you actually moved it several miles away to avoid the loss of
field strength through drifting.
 
If you want to re-queen the parent colony, you could now go
through it, looking for the old queen, preparing to unite the two
colonies by replacing the split board with a sheet of newspaper
for them to chew their way through. But that would defeat the
whole point, wouldn't it?  We're supposed to be doing this
without ever looking for a queen, aren't we?
 
If you can go through and find the old queen, aided by any
tricks/knacks you might have to quickly locate queens, so much
the better.  You're certain of results then.
 
But, believe it or not, you have the odds of success heavily in
your favour if you simply newspaper the two units together
without looking for the old queen at all.  In almost 90% of the
cases, if you unite two colonies with the young queen on the top
of an old queen, the young queen will be left to head the
resulting hive.
 
Why this happens is open to argument.  Some beekeepers will tell
you that the bees always select the best of the two queens. I
doubt that.  My explanation goes along the lines of the young
queen's bees are confined in the top box when you replace the
split board with newspaper.  As well, her field bees returning
cannot use their normal entrance, the slot on the split board.
They then drift down to the main colony entrance.  As they are
foragers returning with a load, they will be accepted without
causing outrageous fighting at the hive entrance.  I think the
old queen is then probably killed by the 'scissor' effect of bees
foreign to her coming at her from both directions - down as the
bees confined above the newspaper chew through and move down in
the hive, and up by the foragers from the top unit coming in
through the bottom entrance and finding a 'strange' queen in
'their' hive.
 
It has certainly worked for me, and if the thought of trying to
find queens is an impossible one for you, the system might be
worth considering.  You might just want to experiment with it to
see if the time savings will repay the small amount of
uncertainty involved.
 
It's not the answer to all of a beekeepers problems, but it just
gives you an idea how by thinking a little bit about bee
behaviour, you can sort out your management system to make your
life a little easier while doing all you can in the interests of
maximum production.
 
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          Nick Wallingford
 (East coast, N Island, New Zealand)
     Internet [log in to unmask]
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