Every spring I re-queen my strongest hives in order to reduce swarming. A colony is less likely to swarm when the queen’s pheromones are strong, and the pheromones are strongest in a first-year queen. In fact, according to most sources, a new queen is the single best deterrent to swarming.
However, it seems ridiculous to take your very best queens, kill them, and replace them with others. And if the new queen is rejected, you are left with nothing.
So a few years ago I started keeping those queens instead of killing them. To do this, I remove the queen along with a frame of brood and a frame of honey and put them in a two-frame nuc. Then I introduce the new queen into the hive. If anything goes wrong with the new queen, I can always re-introduce the old one . . . or I can keep her “in reserve” for some other purpose.
For example, one of the swarms I caught last week appeared to be queenless. The swarm built comb in which it stored only honey, and when I sifted the bees through a queen excluder, I found nothing. So I took one of my reserve queens and introduced her. Once she starts laying the colony will probably supersede her, but without her to get things started, the whole swarm would die.
When I first started saving queens, I wondered what I would do when the two-frame nucs got too populous. But I found that these small colonies tend to expand to fill the available space and then remain constant. When you think about it, they aren’t big enough to swarm or even to abscond. So they just stay small. In the past I’ve kept these “reserve” queens all summer long.
Sometimes I just put a swarm cell, brood, and honey in the small nucs. It seems to take forever, but the bees eventually produce a laying queen and I just leave her there . . . in case. If one doesn’t succeed, I just start another. Since I’m using her only as a backup, it doesn’t really matter how long it takes.
Rusty
Hi Rusty,
This idea is very interesting, thanks. What happens to the reserve queens and nuc bees at the end of the summer, would you kill the queen and recombine the bees into a strong colony?
Hi Millie,
Please see today’s post “How to over-winter a nuc.” I hope I answered your question.
I have a question about keeping a nuc with a queen in it. What do you do with it over the winter months? Second, how can I ask you questions about other things . . . just post them in the comment box or is there a better way? I’m seeing things I’ve never read or heard about in my hive and and I would like your opinion on them.
Jason,
I tried to answer your first question in today’s post, “How to over-winter a nuc.”
As for other questions, you can put them in the comment box, or you can click on the “Contact Me” tab (above the header photo on the right) to send an e-mail. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.
Last year I bread some queens to re-queen my hives that all went ok. I was left with some queens but I gave them away. This year I want to breed again but how do i keep the leftover queens for sale in the hives? Do I make two frame nucs, place the sealed queen cell into each one, and do it that way? Look forward to hear from you.
Paul,
Small nucs are the best way to keep queens for long periods. Queens can be kept in banking frames for short periods, perhaps up to three weeks. A banking frame holds several individual queen cages. The queens are put in the cages without attendants, then the frame is put into a queenless hive or a queenright hive above an excluder. The queens will be cared for by young workers. If the bank is put in a queenless colony, you must add new frames of brood every week so there will be a constant supply of emerging bees to care for the queens. I’ll take a picture of a banking frame this weekend and post it (I hope) within a day or two.
Hi Rusty. Thanks for the reply. Did you manage to take the pictures?
It’s coming.
Hi Rusty, I’m new to beekeeping and computer. Is their a place to join your blog or whatever it’s called? I enjoy and also need to read every thing possible about bees. Thanks, Ted
Hi Ted,
No, there’s nothing to join, you can just “drop by” anytime you want. If you prefer, you can get the daily posts delivered by e-mail. The sign-up is on the the left side of your screen.
Other than that, just feel free to comment or ask questions. If I can’t answer your questions, there are a lot of beekeepers reading this site who probably can.
Congratulations on becoming a beekeeper. You will love it.