Many beekeepers believe that you must remove attendant bees from queen shipping cages before you introduce a caged queen into a hive. They believe the queen will more likely be killed by the receiving hive if both the attendants and the queen have a foreign odor.
This simply is not true. If you install the caged queen properly, the attendants will cause no problem. Before long the queen’s pheromone will circulate throughout the hive. All the bees—as well as the attendants—will then smell the same.
You can install the queen and her attendants by simply putting the shipping cage near the center of the brood nest or cluster. For best results, the hive should have been queenless for at least 24 hours prior to installation. You can then just stick the shipping cage into the wax comb on one of the frames with the screen side open to the bees. Make sure the candy end is up and the cork end is down.
After several days, the worker bees will chew away the candy plug and release the queen into the hive. By then, the pheromone will be well distributed and the attendant workers will be absorbed into the colony along with the queen.
The bigger risk to the queen—especially by inexperienced beekeepers—may result from trying to get the attendants out of the queen cage. Queens have been lost, injured, or killed by well-meaning beekeepers who wrongly believed the attendants were a threat.
For more information on queen introduction, Strachan Apiaries, Inc. has a succinct little write-up on its website. Their instruction sheet specifically states that it is not necessary to remove the attendants. And you can trust them. After all, they are in the business of providing quality queens to beekeepers . . . and they don’t want them destroyed.
Rusty
All of my attendants died and somehow their corpses blocked the whole sugar plug. So I took the cork out, but somehow a dead bee body got stuck in there too. I ended up just taking the screen off and letting her go myself after four or five days. Her majesty does not like to be trapped in a cage with her dead court.
That’s the reason they say to put sugar end up–so any dead attendants fall to the cork end and don’t block the sugar or the exit. This usually works. But I imagine if they got wedged in the sugar end before you install it, that could be a problem.
You did the right thing, of course. I often release the queens by hand anyway, especially if they haven’t gone through the sugar in a day a two.
I was quite surprised to see that she turned rather dingy without her fan club cleaning her constantly. Once she was released, they shined her up inside of a day. Hopefully she is laying in the next day or two.
Is that right? I’ve never seen a dingy queen, but it makes sense. How long was she living alone, do you think? Were the attendants dead when you got her or after? That’s interesting. The four I had shipped here didn’t have any dead, and they were in the mail for several days and then inside my drawer for nearly a week, but still no dead.
The attendants died maybe 3 days after I put the cage in the hive. They were alive when they arrived. Then I turned the cage, and took the cork out and waited another day or two before I got frustrated and took the screen off. It was strange, she definitely looked dull. I have never seen anything like it, even in photos. I should have taken a picture but I was a little “covered in bees” (cue eddie izzard impersonation).