I am coming to you on this blogpost with my pride stinging 🐝 a little bit. You know, I had thought I was just getting the hang of beekeeping and keeping the hives healthy. We have gotten to the point where we need to requeen hive one, so I reached out to Phil Gaven at The Honey Exchange in Portland, Maine, and he got us a great queen to replace the aggressive one.

Somewhere along the line, I could swear I heard on a video that if you use a queen catcher to capture your queen so she doesn’t get crushed, to put her to the side but to put her in the sunlight so she stays warm.. So… that’s what I did with the amazing queen that we got from The Honey Exchange. Well, that’s apparently the opposite of what you are supposed to do. So the queen died, and Phil was not able to replace her. In the interest of queening the hive in the appropriate amount of time, I went to Backwoods Bee Farm in Windham, Maine, and managed to snag their last queen of the day. I was very fortunate to get there when I did.

Each queen is delivered in some type of box or casing which can vary depending on the apiary. But all of them have a crystalized sugar area that acts as an exit once the bees in the hive eat through to release her. This process takes approximately three days. This queen is already marked with the red dot indicating she is a 2018 queen. In this weeks video, you’ll watch me insert the queen into the center of the hive.

Check back in a few days and we'll see if the queen has been accepted!

~Chris, The Boxing Beekeeper

Watch as Chris adds the new queen to Hive 1. Recall that earlier in the week, he had to find the original queen and kill her. The hive had become too aggressive for an urban setting.

Subscribe