How often it is impressed on us to requeen every year if we mean to have a bumper honey crop. C. P. Dadant, in the American Bee Journal, says "I have seen so many good queens prove good the third year that I prefer not to replace a first class two-year old queen by one whose ability is unknown to me. The bees usually requeen in good time, if the matter is left to them."

Dr. Miller comments on this thus: "Same here. Those who think it pays to requeen every year might gain by getting a new strain of bees. Yet there are always some queens which do not come up to the mark and they should be promptly replaced." 

As pertinent to this question let me quote from another American writer in Gleanings, Harry Lathrop, who says: "Another question I should like to touch on ; Mr. Alexander and some others advocate purchasing or rearing queens for wholesale requeening. In our apiary we practise clipping the queens each spring. When clipping time comes we find that only about ten per cent of the queens have clipped wings."

To all of this I can heartily agree, often I have found that a queen had been superseded and never noticed any break in the activity of the colony while this was taking place.

-- R. WHYTE (1919) Bee World

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