> Using Queen cells put in the day of hatch this year we got right at 85% "old queen" replacement. The cells were put in above the brood nest and did a very good job of hunting down and dispatching the old queens. Only about 5% went queenless so about 10% of the time the old queen won the battle. Sample size was 350 queen cells.
Back in the 1980s I sold thousands of queen cells. The going price was $2.00 then. One beekeeper wanted to buy them for $.25 apiece in the summer, to introduce in the upper stories of his hives. He assured me it was a fair price because the demand for queen cells in summer in San Diego was zero. I would make money on the deal. I declined, stating that I would never sell queens for a quarter, no matter what the demand. Anyway, if the technique really worked, why was he unwilling to pay the full price?
Fact is, anyone who has taken the trouble to study this will tell you it doesn't work. The above statement leaves out the most important question, how do you know you got "85% replacement"? The only way would be to mark all the old queens and if you actually went to the trouble to hunt down all 350 queens, you would have killed them and put the cells in the next day. So I assume you didn't do that. Just finding a young queen in most of the hives, proves nothing since bees are raising a lot of new queens this time of year.
My friend Al did comprehensive work on this:
In the summer of 1977, during a slight but steady honey flow, we assessed the efficiency
of queen-cell requeening in the apiaries in the Central Experimental Farm, Ottawa,
Canada. The results of these tests are reported in this paper.
When ripe queen cells (9-10 days after grafting) were placed into queenright colonies, only 15%
of the resident queens were replaced by a new queen. New queens reared in the queenless
half of a temporarily divided colony replaced 50% of the resident queens when the colonies were
re-united. Of the queenless control colonies, 90% were successfully requeened by the queen cell method.
He mentions other experiments which had similar results:
Gary (1959) introduced ripe queen cells to 234 colonies: in only 15 colonies was the resident queen
replaced by a young queen that emerged from the introduced cells ; in 17 colonies,
both queens were killed shortly after the new one emerged, leaving the colony to rear a
queen from existing brood; in 1 colony, the old (established) and the young (introduced)
queens lived together for several weeks.
Boch, R., & Avitabile, A. (1979). Requeening honeybee colonies without dequeening. Journal of Apicultural Research, 18(1), 47-51.
Tibor Szabo had similar results:
All queens were marked with quick-drying paint, and in April and May the right wing-tip of
each queen was removed. Mature queen cells (within about a day of queen
emergence) were introduced into honey supers during the nectar flow.
Four to 5 weeks after queen-cell introduction each colony was checked carefully to
determine the origin of its queen, identified by her marking and colour. Only the unmarked
black queens were from the introduced queen-cells; unmarked yellow queens were
replacements reared by the workers.
Of 474 introductions in 1978-1979 only 12ยท7% resulted in successful requeening, whereas 53% of the
resident queens were retained and 24% were replaced by new queens reared in the colonies.
Szabo, T. I. (1982). Requeening honeybee colonies with queen cells. Journal of Apicultural Research, 21(4), 208-211.
Be that as it may, Forster describe a much better plan which takes very little effort
Two-storeyed colonies can be successfully requeened by raising
the original queen and the brood nest above a division board, rearing
a young queen from an introduced cell in the bottom storey, and then
reuniting both storeys when most advantageous. There is no need to
find queens, and colony manipulation is reduced to a minimum.
[In short, the hive is set aside, the first story is stocked with a few frames of brood without bees, and the brood nest with queen is placed over a division board. A queen cell goes in the lower box. After the queen mates, the hive is recombined. He states that survival rate of young queens by this method was about 93%.]
When divisions headed by young queens were united with parent
colonies headed by original queens, honey production was significantly
higher when the young queens survived (Table 5).
... significantly less honey was produced in hives where the old queen
survived than in hives headed by young queens.
PLB
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