D3236: Requeening queenright honey bee colonies with queen cells in honey supers

Beekeepers frequently need to replace queens heading their honey bee colonies (Apis mellifera L.), however, introducing a new queen is not always successful. Despite the consensus based on research from the 1970s-1980s that introducing new queens to queenless colonies is more likely to be successful, some commercial beekeepers in Alberta perform queenright introductions using queen cells, with enough success to continue the practice. These beekeepers typically introduce queen cells to honey supers of strong double brood chamber colonies during honey flows. Their anecdotal success with this technique begs the question, would results from past experiments be supported today, using this introduction technique? To test this, we introduced queen cells to honey supers of 100 queenright colonies and sampled drone brood at the time of introduction and six weeks later. Maternity was determined using mitochondrial DNA to identify which queen was laying in each colony (original, daughter, or new queen). Our results show that new queens successfully superseded original queens in only 6% of queenright colonies supporting the findings of earlier studies. However, our results also show that supersedure by daughter queens is more common (13%) than new queen supersedure when introducing queen cells to queenright colonies. Further, as the costs associated with requeening queenright colonies with queen cells is lower than the typical practice of dequeening a colony and introducing a mated queen, beekeepers may benefit from a combined 19% success rate of new queen establishment, especially if supersedure is more likely to be successful in colonies with failing queens.