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More advanced beekeeping discussion forum.
 #3823  by Japey Edge
 28 Jun 2019, 10:31
So could you just do that then? Just squish the queen, then swap nasty frames with eggs from nasty hive with pleasant frames with eggs from pleasant hive?
 #3827  by Patrick
 28 Jun 2019, 14:30
You could, but rather than an entire brood swap, I would remove queen, let them raise emergency cells as normal, wait a week and take down all emergency cells (so exhausting potential descendants from problem queen), then put in a single frame of eggs from better colony to let them raise her successor. You still get all the other workers hatching but new queen will be from other stock and as already described the change in temperament can be surprisingly quick.
 #3829  by AdamD
 28 Jun 2019, 14:43
Japey Edge wrote:
27 Jun 2019, 13:26
Do you buy in queens or just requeen with your own?

This might sound crazy but in this instance could you replace all frames of brood in this colony with frames of brood from a well-behaved hive? Then they'll raise a good queen while your other hive just has those bees emerging.

Expect a lot of these bizarre questions from me, I'm really curious.
I re-queen from a selected queen of my own- being doing it for a few years now.

There are 101 methods of requeening. If you have a good colony you can use brood from that. But rather than just squish a queen, I would perhaps do a slower and more gentle approach as if you have a bad-tempered colony, they may well get worse if you make them queenless so I would do an artificial swarm. This keeps the queen laying with the older bees for company. After a week, the queenless part which has minimal older flying bees can have it's queencells removed. The colony will be very keen on either accepting a laying queen at this time or alternatively they will raise queencells from brood from your 'best' colony. Reduce any queencells down to one which is nicely dimpled and with luck you will get a mated queen. You can then unite with newspaper once the new queen is laying well - best to leave for 2 or 3 weeks - removing the unwanted queen first of course. The above is a quick summary - a few bits missing I am sure.
 #3830  by AdamD
 28 Jun 2019, 14:49
Looks like my post has almost crossed with Patricks.


A queen's pheromones can sometimes have a good effect on the workers in the hive - sometimes it takes a couple of months before the genetics change and the behaviour improves though.
If I have a flighty colony I don't care for, I will split that down to make nucs from. Once a new queen from a graft or elsewhere has been laying for a couple of weeks the colony is usually pretty good. Lots of young pheromone from the queen compared to just a few frames of bees seems to do the trick. And of course once her own bees come along and the flightiness will further reduce.