Re-queening a colony with our new 'Apidea' Queen!

Well, I have to say how proud we are of our children's beekeeping this season! Their skills & experience continues to grow with them now doing some fairly advanced beekeeping techniques. 
They were keen to 'have a go' at using the 'Apidea' ( a mini hive usually used as a mating nuc for Queen bees) They can be a bit tricky, as worker bees need to be introduced to 'draw out' sufficient comb for a queen to lay in.  We started our apidea off early this year, and in early July, the children, you may remember introduced one of their home bred queens into it... 
Much excitement yesterday, as we found she had successfully mated, returned to the apidea, and laid up all 3 of the mini frames!

We have 7 colonies in the school apiary and the children were keen to spot during one of our inspections, that the brood pattern on 'C' colony ( a green queen new this year) was patchy, with large areas of drone brood...there were also lots of drones in the colony. Although there was worker brood too, the queen was obviously struggling to lay all worker eggs... looking back at our records, her 'mating flight' coincided with a few weeks of poor weather, probably the reason, although young, she had been poorly mated. 
So, we have to manage our colonies, giving them the best chance of getting through the winter. If we left this Queen in place, sadly the colony would dwindle out as not enough worker bees were being produced to ensure its survival... this is a vital time of year for the bees... bees born now don't live for the usual 6 weeks, they are our WINTER bees, taking the colony through the winter and living up to 6 months, so ensuring the colonies are bursting with healthy well fed bees is our priority. 

So, we decided to Re-Queen this colony with the 'Apidea' queen to give it the best chance of building up some more before the end of the season. 
Queens can't just be put into hives, they have to be carefully introduced as the existing queen and workers would kill the new queen. The pictures below show how the children have 'dispatched' the old queen and introduced the new queen and some of her workers from the apidea.  
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Preparing the 'Butler Cage' where the new Queen will be put to keep her safe in the new colony until the bees have accepted her as their own. Fondant is placed over the entrance, by the time the bees have eaten their way through, her pheromones will be through the colony and fingers crossed they accept her!  
The difficult task of 'dispatching' the old Queen, the children did this quickly and sensibly. We then left the colony for an hour and a half, allowing the bees to realise they were 'Queenless' which hopefully helps them in accepting a new one. 

The children then used an empty super frame to tie the three 'mini' frames of brood to from the Apidea, their nurse bees were with them, keeping them warm. It looks a bit 'Heath Robinson' but they were full of precious worker brood! 

 Next, the new Queen in her cage to protect her, was attached to a frame of brood and the frames, bees and cage were all dusted with icing sugar, the mini frames of brood and worker bees from the apidea were placed in the hive after a liberal dusting too!  The icing sugar not only masks the smell of the 'strange' new bees & queen... The bees are so busy cleaning each other up, they seem to accept the new arrivals without fighting or fuss!

As with most things in beekeeping... there are AT LEAST 20 different ways of doing things, but we have had a go...and fingers crossed, the bees will accept our new Monarch and all will be well. They were all settled and happy as we left them, so I think we have a good chance of success. The colony will now be left alone for 6 days for the Queen to emerge from her cage and hopefully start laying. As always, we will keep you up to date with the news! But well done Bee Team, a brilliant days work!