I've read the rules of requeening, and have tried to follow them. I fail to follow the rules, but have been unable to have a queen killed off.
We tried the push-in cage for the first time earlier this year. The rule is to make sure no other adult bees are under the cage with the queen. However, we managed to let more in than anticipated. Like close to a dozen on our first attempt. Yet, when we checked four days later, there she was, alive and well. and laying eggs. Oh, by the way, somehow the bees had released her from the push in cage. I think they'd burrowed under the cage. The second time, we had fewer adults in the cage with her, but there still managed to be about a half dozen adults. And again, the bees released her, this time by digging through the backside of the comb.
My most recent experience with breaking the rules happened last week. We had spent hours unsuccessfully finding or killing the original queen.
Two weeks earlier, we had managed to kill a queen while she was still in her cage. This happened during the waiting period between the killing of the old queen and the installation of the new one.
Our new queen arrived, and because of our earlier experience, we felt a need to get her into the hive quickly. We went out to the hive, and were successful in finding the queen this time (we had split the hive two days before to reduce their numbers). We killed the old queen, installed the new queen and combined the two halves of the hive. We checked seven days later, and found our new queen going about her business.
There have been a lot of instances where I felt I had surely done things wrong, like putting a fresh queen in a hive that seemed hostile to her. Yet so far, every one of my requeenings have worked.
I guess I've just been lucky. Or maybe it's harder to mess up than I thought.
