Has any one ever inkubated Queen bee cells until they hatch?

Question

What was the success rate once introduced to a queen less colony ?

Answer 1

Yes-it can be done. To do it successfully you require a few bees which can be captured from a colony. There are special small incubating boxes which you can purchase from bee-keeping supplies. You pin the queen cell onto a strut and imprison the bees with it. You need a food source-hard sugar candy will do which you can make by boiling up sugar and water until it is thick. The bees will look after the emerging queen. When she has hatched you put the box into the queen-less colony. The boxes usually have a metal gauze so that the bees can get the smell and the taste of the queen. You plug up an entrance hole with sugar candy and the bees in the colony get the taste and the smell of the new queen and become acclimatised to her as they eat through the candy plug. When they finally eat their way through they will accept the queen because without a queen, the colony will die and they are desperate- PROVIDED there is not another queen in the hive. You have to make absolutely sure that there is not another queen cell coming along as well or you will have a swarm with half of the colony taking off with one of the queens. The queen you have raised will take to the air for a nuptial flight so that she can mate otherwise all the eggs she lays will be infertile. If it is early spring there will probably not be any drones around for her to mate with-they are more plentiful later in the year. You can also buy a mated queen from specialist suppliers ready to introduce, which you do in the same way to allow the bees to get used to her pheremones. They will post you the package with full instructions. Hope this helps To try to raise a queen cell yourself would be nearly impossible-at least I have never heard of it being done though I suppose if you kept to the correct temperature and humidity it would hatch. Then you have to feed it as soon as it emerges. The method I have described is tried and tested and I have had practically 100% success rate.

Oh if you can not get a special container it is easy to make one. One or two faces of it must be fine metal gauze so that the bees can get their tongues through but not their bodies. It should be about four inches square and about an inch wide though size is not important-as long as you can put it in the hive so that the colony bees have access to the queen through the gauze. Then her pheremones will be passed on throughout the colony and the bees will be aware that there is a queen present. If you don't do this the bees will attempt to make a queen cell from an existing egg  and enlarging the wax walls of the brood cell and packing it with royal jelly. What happens in this case is that a sort of imitation queen is produced that will lay eggs but they will all be drones that hatch out from them so the colony is doomed because it is the female workers who gather honey and pollen and do all the work and maintenance in the hive.

Thank you for your comments. I am always happy to help another bee keeper. It is important for the queen to have attendants-they feed the young queen, l*****g her and in this way the pheremones are passed. I can't understand why yours were killed-it can only have been because the colony still had the smell of the old queen and so the new one was regarded as an intruder-with attendant bees it helps to pass the new smell into the colony and because they have to bite their way through the hard candy plug its several days or a week before the queen can get out. By this time every bee has her smell and she is accepted. Sorry to be so long winded

Dave