Requeening Aggressive Hives
My cousin Simon started the season with two colonies but when I went to see him last week, up in Yorkshire, I discovered he had seven colonies after several swarms landed in his garden.
The problem for Simon, and potentially his neighbours, were that four of the colonies were aggressive and impossible to inspect. Furthermore, he doesn’t want seven colonies!
As he knew I was coming up, he decided this was the perfect time to adopt me as his Deputy Beekeeper and bought three mated Queens for us to begin the Requeening process.
Requeening Aggressive Bees – Our Approach
We started out with low expectations about even finding the Queens that needed to be culled (they were unmarked and he had never seem them) and took anti-histamine before we started. Always be prepared and all that.
Our general approach to requeening these aggressive colonies was as follows:
- Have a plan on paper so that you know what you are going to do with respect to which colonies to requeen, queens to cull and hives to unite
- Smoke hive
- Move aggressive colony 3m away on to a table
- Put spare super on original site
- Wait 10 minutes
- Aggressive colonies are now a lot calmer and easier to inspect
- Find Queen (this sometimes involved going through colony twice and on one occasion trying to shake bees through a queen excluder)
- Cull Queen
- Put frames back in hive and move back to original site
- Install new queen in her queen cage sandwiched between brood frames
- If uniting, put newspaper on top, punch small holes, put new colony on top (make sure this is queen-less)
- Wait a week
As you might be able to tell from the photo below, Simon and I are not hardened killers. This was our first time culling Queens and it was a bit disturbing. We knew we were doing it for the right reasons but us beekeepers put so much effort into raising queens and hoping they get mated that to kill these laying Queen’s seemed somewhat perverse.
Results
The approach was a success.
- We culled 4 Queens
- Requeened 3 colonies
- United colonies so that he ended up with 5 (1 colony was queen-less)
- No stings
Requeening Video
Postscript
5 days later Simon emailed “Fondant eaten, newspaper removed, just before bad weather came … fingers crossed all will settle!”
I have yet to find out if the new Queens are alive and laying.
Read More
- Post: Aggressive Bees & A Physiological Reaction
- How-To Guide: Combining Hives
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Good advice bringing the hive away from it’s original place. I had one aggressive hive but I waited 24 hours after I culled the original queen before re-queening as I wanted some of her pheromones to be less present, I was anxious that they might be less keen to accept a new queen but sounds like it worked okay for you guys. Hope you will see eggs soon.
Thanks for all the great blogs, most helpful
Love your blogs. Keep blogging please. Pete.
Thanks for the support Pete. Always appreciated.
Well done both, very useful advice.
Well done. Hopefully you will have 5 very active hives. I attempted to re-queen a queenless swarm and although the queen was accepted the colony was too small to maintain itself. But good practice nevertheless. Always good to learn new skills in this game.
Thanks for the positive comments all! It was a good job, well executed! I’ve resisted the temptation to sneak a peek until now and can confirm I’ve just seen two of the three new queens happily wandering around their new homes. I couldn’t find the third at the moment. Anyhow, I’ve started apiguard treatment now for two of my hives where there will be no honey this year and will then feed. It will take some time for the new queens to establish their own colonies so I won’t know the results of hopefully gentler bees until later.
Inspected today and the hives with the two new queens do seem calmer and masses of bees and a good amount of stores also. However the bees in third hive didn’t seem to have accepted the queen, no sign of her and no eggs etc. So I’ve had to unite with a nuc I have. I now have four hives going into autumn/winter.
Plan to use a frame of eggs from the two requeened hives next year and requeen my other two hives.