Introducing Virgin Queens

There are different ways to introduce virgin queens to your apiary. I feel some introduction methods have a higher success rate than others. If you prepare ahead of time, you will have more success. Colonies tend to accept queens better when they have no other options available. I'm not going to go into all of them, but here are some examples. The main focus for the following examples is that the colony has no way to make a queen with what they have when you introduce your caged queen. Queen acceptance is better during a flow than when there is a dearth. It can help to feed a colony that you are introducing a queen to.

When you make a colony queen less for 7 days, then go back in and inspect for queen cells, shaking all the bees from the frames and knock down all cells that are started before adding your new queen in a cage your chances for acceptance will increase. Let the colony candy release the queen after they have no other options for making a queen. Give them a couple of weeks and check for eggs.

Another option, which is my preferred option, is to make a strong split moving the split without the queen to another location in the same yard. Make sure that there is open brood in the split to lock some of the bees to the box. Most of the foragers will fly back to the original location. You will end up with mostly nurse bees which I feel are more accepting. Once again you will wait about 7 days and check for queen cells knocking down any that they have started. After you have knocked down any cells you can then put the cage with the new queen in, and let them candy release her. I like to place the queen cage between brood frames pinching the cage between the tops of the bars. You can also push the cage into the comb. Don't push it into honey or nectar. Make sure the bees in the box have access to some of the holes to feed the queen. Once the cage is in, close the hive up and leave them alone for a couple of weeks. After a couple of weeks you can check for eggs. If you don't see eggs or any sign of the queen after 2 weeks, you can add a frame of eggs and see if they do anything with them. If they don't do anything with the eggs then you most likely still have your new queen, she just hasn't started laying yet. If they start drawing cells, then your queen probably didn't make it back from her mating flight or wasn't accepted. The open brood that you added by adding the frame of eggs will also help buy you more time for the hive before they want to start laying workers.

If you have a colony that has been queen less for a while, over a week, and has no queen cells you can normally get away with adding the queen cage without doing any other prep.