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. ******************************************************* * Search the BEE-L archives at: * * http://listserv.albany.edu:8080/cgi-bin/wa?S1=bee-l * *******************************************************