Thanks go out to Emily of the UK for putting the idea of introducing a queen to a new hive without the cage – an aggressive approach compared to our seven-day slow introduction method with a caged queen that has proven to work quite well in our hives. I came home today and when Mark got home, he surprised me with news that he and Danielle requeened a hive using the cageless introduction technique. Cool! He said while they were out in the bee yard feeding, doing mite treatments and dividing when they came across one of our new Jester Bees hive. That hive had lost its queen and the girls made their own, which Mark does not want here in Texas. So, he decided this was an opportunity to try the more aggressive approach – doesn’t hurt to try and I guess his curiosity had been piqued. First things first, he found and killed that queen the girls made for themselves. In the following picture, he is clearing off the attendant bees from the Big Island queen, as best he can.
After that, he put a very heavy smoke on the hive itself to really sedate them. Don’t worry, it won’t harm the bees.
Here he is pushing apart a couple of frames to make sure that when he releases her, she’ll be near or on the brood nest.
And there she goes when he pulls back the wire protective screen.
After all that, he put some feed into the box for them and now we wait and hope. He will go back and check on them next week some time.
I want to thank the wonderful Danielle for taking these pictures for us – we wouldn’t have them if she wasn’t with Mark. Sounds like she had a better out in the yards with Mark, which makes me happy to hear. 🙂
Gretchen Bee Ranch 
Maybe you’ve explained this before, but what is the reason for not wanting the ‘girls’ to make their own queen? And where do you get a new one to introduce?
Hi Diane. Here in Tx we have issues with the aggressivenss of Africanized bees. They can be very unpleasant to work with so we requeen our hives almost annually with out-of-state queens bred for gentleness. The breeders send us queens that are already mated so that we know the queens won’t mate with potentially Africanized drones here in Texas. The mated queens are delivered to us via postal services (UPS, FedEx or USPS) and arrive from various states. Mark typically orders queens from states not experiencing the same Africanized bees issue that we have to deal with here.
That is so neat. I would have never known that. I do know that the Africanized bees are a problem to honey production, but wasn’t aware of this remedy.
They actually do a good job with honey production here. It’s just the matter of working with meanies and then trying to get their honey from them. 🙂
Oh wow, wasn’t expecting you to try it so soon! Will be interesting to see if the uni researchers are right and it works. Fingers crossed.
I wasn’t either but here we go! 🙂
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