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It's not about the queens, it's about the drones (male bees). The workers only start laying eggs if the hive goes without a queen for several weeks, and either
by i_cannot_hack 6y ago
It's not about the queens, it's about the drones (male bees).
The workers only start laying eggs if the hive goes without a queen for several weeks, and either way the eggs they lay are unfertilized and therefore cannot be raised into new queens. So requeening it is certain to work in that regard.
However, unless you euthanize whole hive, the aggressive drones will continue to live for a while and can mate with queens in neighbouring hives and spread the aggressive genes that way. So there is an advantage to euthanizing the whole hive instead of requeening it.
- lostlogin 6y agoRequeening is ideally done with a queen that is from known good stock, not by emergency requeening. I’ve just done it at home. It’s cheaper to raise your own, but you will get traits that are undesirable, aggression being one. The drones in a hive are not all raised there, they move about hives, so killing the hive won’t get them all. Hives that have got a laying worker are also very hard to requeen and it usually isn’t possible. One way is to shake all the bees out some distance away then hope the laying worker doesn’t make it back to the hive (she can’t fly). However those hives are hard to fix, as they usually reject the new queen. There is a lot of differences in beekeeping region to region and country to country, so whatever I have seen and done may be very different to other places.