Are you halfway through the queen introduction process and your precious mated queen is struggling to leave the cage and you are now wondering how to remove a queen stuck in the cage? This blog post is for you as it details how to safely remove the queen and introduce her into the colony, without her flying off.
Let's take a step back and start from the very beginning. You want to replace the queen in your beehive, maybe with one our mated queen bees for sale, which are available here - https://www.blackmountainhoney.co.uk/buyqueenbees
You start the queen introduction process, which for those of you are who are unfamiliar with it, generally starts with killing the existing queen. The full process can be found on the link below: https://www.blackmountainhoney.co.uk/guides/how-to-requeen-a-beehive
Day 0: Kill existing queen
Day 8: Remove all emergency queen cells
Day 8: Add mated queen in cage
Day 9: Remove fondant tab
Day 15: Check to see if queen has been released and accepted.
If you come back on day 15 and the queen is still in the cage, there is a problem and you need to intervene to ensure the queen is safely released.
It's important to understand at this point, that the queen leaving the cage is entirely normal and probably happens in around 5% of introductions. It's no failing on the queen or the cage.
Sometimes they just get a bit nervous. If the accepting colony wanted to kill her, they would have done it by now, so you can safely assume she has now been accepted into the colony. She is just reluctant to pass through the fondant plug or cage walls.
So if you come across a stuck queen, the natural urge is to open the cage and let her out. I was in this exact situation as a novice and what happened when I opened the cage to release her? She flew off over the horizon never to be seen again. £40 down the drain and 3 weeks of the season lost. SO frustrating.
Now you can take her into a shed and open the cage their and play 'fetch the queen off the walls' all you like but I wouldn't recommend it and not everyone has a shed on site. The method detailed below is far safer and can be done with nothing more than 50ml of water.
So, if you come across this rare occurrence, this is how to safely fix the issue and get the queen released into the beehive:
Take trapped queen in cage from hive.
Spray, dribble or drop entire cage in water. There are many ways to do this. Just need to ensure the queens wings are wet.
Safely open the cage and place queen onto the top frames of hive. She will wander in and as her wings are wet, she cannot fly away!
Here is a video that shows the full process from start to finish:
You can see from the pictures below, there is plenty of space in the cages for the queens to exit. We have also removed the ridges from the previous cage design to hopefully eliminate any future occurrences of queens getting trapped in their cages.
If you are interested in requeening your colony of bees and looking for mated queen bees for sale, check out of the following link to view our range of mated queen bees:
Our favourite queens to use in the UK are our F1 Buckfast queen bees which are known for their excellent honey production and calm, placid temperament.
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