Читать книгу Honey Bee Medicine for the Veterinary Practitioner - Группа авторов - Страница 120

There are a million suggestions for introducing queens. In general:

 Remove the old queen and wait a day.

 If the replacement queen is closely related, and in laying condition, she can be successfully introduced at the entrance with a few puffs of white smoke.Figure 5.36 Placing a queen headfirst into a queen cage for her own protection, to be used to release her back into the colony after it has been put back together. I will plug the end with a miniature marshmallow or piece of green leaf, which then allows the colony to calm down by the time the bees have chewed their way through the plug.Figure 5.37 Bee behavior indicating acceptance of a caged queen. The bees will be moving over the screen, offering the queen food, and can be easily brushed away with a finger. Once you observe this behavior, it is safe to remove the cover from the candy plug, in order to allow the workers to release the queen some time after you have closed the hive back up. Then replace the still‐plugged cage into the hive with the screen exposed to the workers.

 Requeening via the insertion of queen cells into a queenright hive has been shown again and again not to be successful.

 For extremely valuable queens, use a push‐in cage, or better yet, introduce her first into a nuc containing only brood and nurse bees.

 Otherwise, introduce her in a queen cage with a candy plug, pushed into a brood frame (but not into honey, which may drown her).

 Releasing any attendants from the queen cage will greatly improve success at introduction. Do so in an enclosed area to avoid having a queen fly off (although if you hold still, she may return to the cage).Figure 5.38 Bees that are not accepting a queen. These workers are attempting to bite and “ball” the queen. They will be biting the screen and cannot be easily moved away with a finger. Such behavior generally means that there is already another queen in the hive, or that the queen in the cage has a very different odor than the “colony scent.”

 For best results, do not remove the candy plug cover until after inspecting the caged queen the next day (Figures 5.37 and 5.38)

Practical application: It is often difficult to replace a queen with a queen of another race.