A gentle Bee, producing good quantities of honey and with great low maintenance, over wintering tendencies. These Queens are prolific layers, they will soon fill all available cells with eggs/brood given the right conditions in the hive, stores and space. We have personally used these Bees in our own apiaries for a number of years.
Why requeen in September? Several reasons we requeen late season -
- A newly mated Queen just wants to lay. They will lay at a prolific rate, producing lots of young Bees for overwintering.
- Less chance of being rejected by the host Bees, this is probably their last opportunity for the hives survival before winter, so essentially, replace poor quality Queens, with laying problems or aggression. The foot note to this should be do not try to requeen a large aggressive hive without first splitting it into 3 or 4 frame nucs, then requeen each nuc.
- Maybe you want to start suppling nucs locally in the spring? Preparation is key, ideally prep the nuc or hive 4 or 5 days before requeening by dispatching the old queen or splitting a large hive into viable nucs to overwinter, thus producing young colonies for the spring.
After checking thoroughly for any Queen cells and destroying them, you should be ready to introduce your new queen. A feed is a good idea at the moment, most places the ivy has not started and its always good to make sure the hive has a food source.
We add a syrup, this we believe helps stimulate the hive.
Anecdotally, we have found very low numbers of varroa in hives that have these Queens, this could be due to local conditions or even a year with low numbers in general, we are unsure why this is. We like to think it’s the nature of this particular Queen that is encouraging grooming and cleaning. We used an Oxalic hive cleaner last winter/January, that probably helped.