Requeening the Hard Way

I woke up at 3:30 this morning thinking about how to do the requeening of the blue hive successfully. I think I eventually went back to sleep because it was 6:30 when I noticed things again. When it was time to get up, I was a bit groggy, but requeening pretty much followed what I had worked out in those sleepless hours.

The first thing on the list was to get frames ready. I had 6 medium super frames ready to go. I made one of my unused supers into a 9-frame; so I had three to do. I fixed up two that had previously been destroyed by wax moths, installing new foundation in each. I had an unused frame that just needed foundation.

I also decided earlier that I needed to replace the brood frames Doug had lent me with frames that had cross wires strengthening the foundation. I had spent a little time in the mornings the past few weeks building frames and putting in the crimp wire. So I just needed to install foundation, which I did.

I came home from work for lunch and Doug Shaw and I followed my plan. Doug and I totally disassembled the blue hive. I poked the little hole needed in the candy of the queen cage and took the least used frame from the original brood box and pushed the cage into the upper part. I took out a frame out of the yellow hive that had brood on it and replaced it with one of the frames I had just built. I added the brood frame to the bottom brood box of the blue hive, next to the frame where the new queen was placed.


Then the fun started. We took out each frame and shook the bees to the ground. The theory Larry Tate told us was that if we had a laying worker bee, she would be too heavy to fly back into the hive. I am pretty sure there wasn't a live queen. The bees had tried everything they could to make a new one, swarm cells and emergency queen cells. But since only drone brood had been laid, unless mother nature was really going to play a trick, they weren't going to become queens. We destroyed those cells.

Then we started the process of putting everything back together. I replaced the frames Doug had lent me with frames that had cross wires in the lower brood box. We packed the upper brood box so that the honey laden frames were in the middle. I added a new super because there was a fair amount of honey already in the old super and added an Imirie shim between them.

About this time, the bees were plenty riled. (I'm sure this is good English!) Kathy, who took the photos, started getting hit from about 20 feet away and ended up running around the garden. (She had no veil or suit on.) That part was fun to watch.

The bees quickly found their home and moved in. I went to visit after work. Things are now settled down.