Elements and Performance Criteria
- Identify requirement to requeen a colony
- Prepare to requeen a colony
- Replacement queens that meet enterprise criteria are obtained from a commercial supplier or from own breeding stock.
- Replacement queens and any escort worker bees are stored in appropriate conditions and monitored until requeening is undertaken.
- Hive is monitored to ensure requeening occurs under optimum conditions.
- Replacement queen is confirmed as being healthy and free from parasites.
- Introduce replacement queen bee
- Old queen bee is located in the hive and removed.
- Where queen bee has been raised in a nucleus colony, either nucleus colony is placed on top of colony to be requeened, and the two colonies separated by a single layer of paper, or queen bee is caught and introduced into another colony.
- Hive is left undisturbed for a period of ten days.
- Monitor progress of a replacement queen bee