Quintrex Cage

[Eyeman]

I suspect they had a virgin, or, you had a large number of older foragers in the nuc. If you follow the method I described above, you'll have more success.

All usual precautions taken and usual supects excluded.
Colony was an active double nat so not a nuc.
Before introduction of 2 & 3 rd queen a test frame showed QC's. So unlikely there was a resident Q, virgin or otherwise.
If you do enough re-queening you will find the odd one that doesn't play the game.

 

[B+.]

All usual precautions taken and usual supects excluded.
Colony was an active double nat so not a nuc.
Before introduction of 2 & 3 rd queen a test frame showed QC's. So unlikely there was a resident Q, virgin or otherwise.
If you do enough re-queening you will find the odd one that doesn't play the game.

Maybe you missed my second suspicion: lots of old foragers? If it was a full colony, the number of older foragers would be high. These are often a problem in queen rearing/introduction. In fact, asking a queen coming into lay to produce enough pheromone to satisfy a full colony could also have been your problem. That is why I introduce to nucs containing mostly young bees (i.e. move the nuc so that older bees drift back to the original site). Also, a full colony would have brood in all stages. If you had waited until all of the eggs had become sealed brood, they would have had no choice but to accept your introduced queen.
Of course, some colonies will behave differently. It's just the way bee are. However, I think, in this case, your losses were avoidable (I'm not saying that to have a dig at you, just to try to help you understand how you might avoid similar losses in future).

 

[Eyeman]

Maybe you missed my second suspicion: lots of old foragers? If it was a full colony, the number of older foragers would be high. These are often a problem in queen rearing/introduction. In fact, asking a queen coming into lay to produce enough pheromone to satisfy a full colony could also have been your problem. That is why I introduce to nucs containing mostly young bees (i.e. move the nuc so that older bees drift back to the original site). Also, a full colony would have brood in all stages. If you had waited until all of the eggs had become sealed brood, they would have had no choice but to accept your introduced queen.
Of course, some colonies will behave differently. It's just the way bee are. However, I think, in this case, your losses were avoidable (I'm not saying that to have a dig at you, just to try to help you understand how you might avoid similar losses in future).

When your requeening 50 nucs sometime twice in a season and dealing with requeening production colonies to improve stock I have to compromise and not use the belts and braces approach we all know improves success.

 

[B+.]

When your requeening 50 nucs sometime twice in a season and dealing with requeening production colonies to improve stock I have to compromise and not use the belts and braces approach we all know improves success.

Actually, I am (again....not a dig at you...just saying that I do have some experience in this).
I would always manage the nucs as described previously (https://www.beekeepingforum.co.uk/showpost.php?p=617214&postcount=33)

 

[Swarm]

All usual precautions taken and usual supects excluded.
Colony was an active double nat so not a nuc.
Before introduction of 2 & 3 rd queen a test frame showed QC's. So unlikely there was a resident Q, virgin or otherwise.
If you do enough re-queening you will find the odd one that doesn't play the game.

There was quite a bit of that going on last year. Nucs accepting new queens, new queen laying well, suddenly no queen but lots of cells.

I make up fairly weak nucs of nurse bees on sealed brood, once they accept her I can always add combs of sealed brood to strengthen numbers.

 

[maddydog]

When I am forming a nuc, I usually raise frames of brood above a queen excluder (making sure the queen is below the excluder). Then, 9 days later, any eggs the queen has just laid will be sealed brood. Of course, they will realise they are queenless and start to raise emergency cells above the excluder. I move the nuc to a new stand and go through the frames carefully (even to the extent of shaking the bees from each frame). You can't leave any queen cells behind so they ALL have to be destroyed. With no queen, and no way to make one, they will usually accept any queen you give them. However, with a valuable queen, it makes sense to introduce her under a push-in cage so that she has plenty of time to be accepted before she is released to the general population.
It's not so much that there is a difference in the genes that gets a queen killed. It's more that she doesn't act/smell like a laying queen.

Thanks B+

Very interesting how you use the capped brood above a queen excluder.

Nice to see a thread that has not strayed off topic and is snipe-free

 

[bontbee]

Push in cage is easy to make,,, and use
Tried the BekyBies plastic on... does not penetrate into the wax enough.

Mixing thoroughbred with mongrels.... no problem... often requeen buckie/carniogoitalian/cockerpoo swarms with thouroughbred native Cornish black Amm !

Yeghes da

May I ask if you have the same success rate for the converse, introducing buckie/carniogoitalian/cockerpoo swarms to Amms??? ta

 

[Finman]

.
If you want to change the swarm's queen, wait at least one or two weeks before you do that. Bees are so beloved to its queen, that the colony become often yotally confused and returns to its original home.

Last summer I changed the the queen to a feral swarm. It killed 3 mated queens.
After a month I noticed that the swarm had 3 virgin queen.


.

 

[For want of a better word]

May I ask if you have the same success rate for the converse, introducing buckie/carniogoitalian/cockerpoo swarms to Amms??? ta

Not something I do...

Although some many years back I remember requeening a colony of hybrids with a so called "pure" carniolian queen ( From a breeder in the Wirrall)... remember she arrived in the post with 3 dead workers, clipped and was marked with a blue numbered disc.. run into a hoplessly queenless colony.. she ran out three times, caught and put back in... eventually trapped her inside with a qx... produced a mammoth amount of brood then swarmed, with 3 casts ... all caught... never did produce much honey and succumbed to the salty winds / nosema that winter!

Yeghes da

 

[B+.]

I remember requeening a colony of hybrids with a so called "pure" carniolian queen

If the queen was from pure stock, she would be pure. However, her daughters wouldn't be pure if she was open mated. I don't think people understand that how she is mated has as much impact on her colonies performance as her ancestry

 

[beebreeder]

Identical to the cages I use, I just soldered the corners to make them more rigid, sorry no image I cannot get images to upload here from I pad

 

[Bosleeu]

I just noticed this on the Thornes website.
https://www.thorne.co.uk/queen/cages?product_id=7865

Mine are all home-made but these look quite useful. Has anyone used them?

I bought two and just introduced queens with them. Checked two days later. In one the bees chewed a whole in one corner and filled the cage completely. The queen was fine so I released her and she started walking across the frame like she was born there. The other one worked exactly as planned - some newly emerged bees and a happy queen, all released safely. Something I noticed is that in both nucs the bees didn't bother making queen cells once the cages and queens were in. Will definitely use again.

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk