When your Queen arrives, she will be mated and in a cage with fondant and between 5 and 10 attendants. Before introducing your Queen, please take some time to read through the below, especially if this is your first time introducing a Queen. Many beekeepers will have a tried and tested method of how they introduce Queens, below is how we do it here at Hagen's Bees.

Before receiving a new Queen, you must make sure that your nuc.hive/split is queenless and check again just before introduction - this means no Queen cells or eggs present. 

The first step is to check for any queen cells, shake off every frame (even the ones that are full) of stores and check for any sign of a Queen cells and destroy. Now with the size of the receiving colony, a small nuc with nurse bees is ideal. It should be a healthy mix of brood and bees, not too big and not too small - 2 to 3 frames of brood well covered with bees is best.

When you receive your Queen, she will be in a cage with her attendants. The best advice is to remove the attendants, some people disagree with this method, but it is what we do with our Queens.

At this stage you need to make sure you have made up a feed, a weak liquid feed is best, that is made up of around 50% solids. Most premixed syrups are around 70 – 75%, so just add some warm water to reduce the solid % in your syrup.

Carefully remove the tabs at the bottom of the cage and suspend between 2 frames of Brood using a cocktail stick or similar. Now the bees have access to the fondant and will start to chew this away to release the Queen. Feed the nuc/split and leave. Now the hardest part of all, this will require all your patience and skill - you must leave the colony alone for two weeks. The Queen needs to settle down and start to lay and this will give her an uninterrupted chance to do that.

When you re-open the colony for the first inspection try and use as little smoke as possible, just a whiff at the entrance then wait 5 minutes. We usually smoke then pop our suits on and sort out our hive tools etc - this allows the smoke alarm get around hive. Remember to not use rolled up cardboard cartridges or anything with glue, the glue smoulders and has an acrid smell.

Once you are in the hive, you are now looking for eggs, make this inspection quick, don’t worry if you see several eggs in one cell a new queen will often do this. The presence of eggs will indicate a successful Queen introduction!