queen

In beekeeping, to queen a hive means to install a fertile queen bee into a colony that is either queenless or about to become queenless. A queen is the only reproductive female in a healthy colony, and without one, worker bees will eventually die off as they age and no new workers emerge from the brood. The operation is straightforward in principle but demands care in execution, since introducing a strange queen can trigger colony rejection and death of the queen.

The most common scenario for queening occurs after a colony loses its queen through disease, accident, or old age. A beekeeper sources a replacement queen, usually from a commercial breeder, and introduces her into the hive using one of several methods. The cage method involves placing the queen in a small cage, usually wooden or plastic with a mesh side, and wedging it between frames. Workers gradually accept her scent through the mesh over several days, then gnaw through a candy plug to release her. Alternatively, a beekeeper may use a more direct method on a queenless hive that is already accepting brood, placing her directly on a frame with young larvae or pupae nearby.

A queenless colony is most likely to accept a new queen within hours of losing the old one. If a hive has been queenless for more than a few days, workers may have begun laying eggs, a condition called laying workers. A colony in this state will almost certainly reject an introduced queen because the workers' own reproduction has begun. The presence of young larvae, ideally less than three days old, strongly favors acceptance because the colony recognizes its need for a fertile female to maintain itself.

Commercial queens arrive marked with paint on the thorax, typically white, yellow, red, blue, or green, allowing easy visual identification in the hive. These queens are often Italian, Carniolian, or hybrid stock, bred for disease resistance and temperament as much as for laying rate. A newly introduced queen will not lay for several days while she settles and is tended by workers. Once she begins laying, a healthy queen should produce 1500 to 2000 eggs per day during the active season, sustained by the royal jelly that workers secrete for her.

Failure to establish often results from poor timing, introducing a queen into a colony that already has a queen or capped emergency queen cells, or from rough handling that stresses the queen. The smell of a newly introduced queen is also foreign, and workers may ball her, clustering around her and generating lethal heat, if her scent is perceived as too far removed from the colony's existing odor profile. This is why cage introduction, slower than direct introduction, carries better odds of success in established colonies that may be skeptical of strangers.