Hi, I’m Stewart Spinks and welcome to Episode 74 of my podcast, Beekeeping Short and Sweet.Catch up with the latest episodes HERE

This week I’m following up on a question posted by one of our Patrons regarding swarm management and general inspections through the active season. If inspecting your bee hive gives you a feeling of impending doom each time, stay tuned and I’ll hopefully give you some pointers to make the whole task more relaxed.

Before we get into the detail of Ben’s question I thought I’d recap on another busy week. Queen rearing has been interesting this week, we had half a dozen emerged virgin queens trapped in the Nicot hair roller cages that needed to be moved into queenless nucs and I attempted a new method of introduction which involved liberally covering the virgin queen with sugar syrup and simply letting her run onto a frame whereby the workers would get stuck into the sugar syrup and start cleaning the new queen thus accepting her and not attacking her.

This is the first time I’ve attempted something like this but the benefits of a successful introduction means saving a few days compared to a normal caged introduction. Having set up the nuc as queenless the day before I did as instructed and pretty much covered the queen in syrup, bless her, she really was covered, the syrup ran down onto the frame where the workers immediately started cleaning it up. I took this was the opportunity to run the virgin queen onto the same frame in the middle of the syrup and sure enough, the workers immediately set about licking the sugar syrup off the queen and generally cleaning her up. Success, I have to say I was feeling pretty smug about the whole operation and particularly glad that we had chosen to capture the exercise on video to post to the Patreon site for everyone to see.

That was until about twenty seconds after I ran the queen out of the cage and into the syrup. It all seemed fine but then one worker took exception to this new queen in their presence and started harassing her, first the worker climbed all over her and then started curling down her abdomen to try to sting her, I left it for a couple of seconds longer as it was only one worker but this worker obviously didn’t like her proposed new queen because when she couldn’t get enough purchase to sting her she started to bite her and it became more and more vicious and frantic. Then another worker decided to join in and that for me was enough. I wasn’t going to stand by and watch them attack my beautiful new virgin queen. The problem was the instigator of the attack had now got such a strong bite of the virgin queen's wing when I picked up the worker the queen came with her. I actually had to walk away from the nuc and spend several seconds encouraging the worker to let go which she did eventually and I was able to get he virgin queen safely into a cage for her own protection.

Now as I said, I’ve not attempted this before so it’s all been very new to me. Having considered everything I did, I have come to the conclusion that firstly, the nuc was far too large for the introduction of this virgin queen in this manner and secondly maybe I should have left them queenless for a longer period of time before trying to introduce a virgin queen who’s pheromones are not as strong as a fully mated queen, who knows. Suffice to say, the rest of the virgin queens for introduction were put into cages and introduced in a more traditional way. I’ll be back to check on them over the weekend so we’ll see if they’ve been released and accepted or not.

It’s been the last push to getting supers on colonies where needed, always a tricky proposition as I don’t like giving them too much space now we’re heading to the end of the Summer nectar flow. I want the bees to fill every last space in the supers they