We Have tried several caging techniques to introduce laying Carniolan (Apis mellifera carnica) queens to queenlees colonies of the East African lowland honey bee (Apis mellifera scutellata). Unfortunately, nothing works!!.
Should you have experience with this issue, please do guide us!
or you please do share your thoughts should you have suggestions.
Thanks
Yeah you can use this by introducing the Queen bee in cage having 4 or 5 workers bees that feed her in cage.the cage must hang between the parallel frames for the period of 2 or 3 days in queenless hive.so that the pheromones that released by queen bee in cage make it familiar with population outside the cage in frames..after the tentative time open the cage the workers from the frames guarded her and not kill her as introduer .and after that she start egg lying and continuous work start of population increasing population of hive with the help of this new bee Queen.
Have you tried establishing the new queen onto a comb of European-sized cells (with African bees), or a push-in cage onto emerging African brood ? A laying Carniolan queen may not be a good fit with the narrow worker cells of an established African colony.
I would recommend re-queening by:
1. Ensuring your established colony has been queenless for 24-48 hours, and then killing all queen cells they made in that time
2. Putting the queen in (WITHOUT attendants, because bees don't like foreign attendants in their colonies) hardware cloth/mesh that is pushed into a frame side. The frame side should have a small amount of open brood, and space for her to lay. The cloth should be pushed in enough that she cannot get out and workers from the colony cannot get in. There should be enough room (you will likely have to take a frame out of the colony to ensure this) that the workers can crawl all over the hardware cloth/push in cage.
3. 4 days later, check and see if she has been laying. We have not lost queens when we have used this method of introduction, but we have taken the push in/hardware cloth out to observe the workers interacting with her for a bit. If the interactions are positive (feeding her, attending her), then put the frame with the uncaged queen back into the colony and let them do their thing. If the worker-queen interactions are negative (climbing all over her, biting her, balling her), then rescue her and put her back in the push in cage for another 2 days. At the end of 2 days (or so), try again.
Does all this make sense? It is also worth talking to your area beekeepers to see what they are successful doing; area beekeepers normally have the best handle on things like this.
Hi
First you choose a frame from an African colony and a frame from a carniolan colony and you put each round in a hive at a great distance and then you smell them by creating smoke inside the hive. After one day, reduce the distance between the frames and bring them closer together. But they are still far apart. Use the smoke again. On the second day, bring the frames together and place the queen in a cage between two frames. Pour some pollen cake in the cage until it reaches the queen by eating it. Most likely the queen will be accepted and the bees of these two breeds will not kill each other.
I hope this method is effective in African bees because this type of bee hardly accepts another queen, even of its own kind.
Good luck
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