I need to requeen all my hives not because I signed a piece of paper promising that I would implement Best Management Practices (BMP), but because I have never requeened in the Fall. I read that Fall queens will lay eggs longer because they are new queens and they haven’t learned to shut down as soon as the Spring queens at this time of the year. That means that the Fall queens will have more bees going into the Winter and the colony will be stronger going into the Spring.

BMP means that one should requeen at least once a year to keep the colony strong. An older queen sometimes did not mate with enough drones to keep her in sperm for a longer period and she would be prone to lay more drones than worker bees. A new young queen would more fertile and be prone to lay more worker bees.

IPM means controlling the mites and hive beetles to a tolerable threshold level by using legal chemicals or using non chemicals such as powdered sugar to dust the bees to remove the Varroa Mites.

Without checking the colonies to see which hive needed queens, I ordered enough queens to place one in each colony that I have. I also ordered extra bees for a couple of beekeepers to help keep the cost down by ordering bulk. They also would help with the shipping cost.

The bees arrived Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning I delivered the beekeepers their orders and I planned to introduce my queens Friday. However, the local news paper called and wanted to do a photo shoot with me working my bees and they wanted to do it on Friday. If you ever have reporters follow you around, you will find out that they want you to pose or show your bees in a certain way for pictures or video and that takes time. You really cannot work on a schedule that way. I have other obligations during some days of the week and I have scheduled things to work smoothly for myself and the other obligations. I didn’t have a schedule for the reporters and photographers, so I had to change things around to meet the needs of the day.

One of the beekeepers called and said that he needed to order more queens as another beekeeper decided that re queening would be good for his bees too. I lucked out by selling my queens to them. Now I am not pressed for time to use my queens. I will just order at another time when it will fit my schedule better. Now I can really concentrate on the reporters then get some other needed work done before I dedicate time for the queens.

In this business, you have to be flexible. Nothing is set in stone except when working with queen cells. When using queen cells, you are governed by time. When the cells are ready to hatch, they do it in a timed fashion. Usually when you order queen cells, you only have one to two day in which to install them as they are ready to hatch and hatch they will. If you haven’t installed them when they hatch then the queens will try to kill each other and that is not a pretty sight. Especially when you pay good money for them. I’ll explain the use of queen cells in a later post.

Don’t forget to read. If you haven’t subscribed to the American Bee Journal or Bee Culture, then consider doing that now. There is a lot of good information about keeping bees, research, and general information to be had in these magazines. Enjoy your bees.