Went down to the ranch yesterday afternoon to check on the newly installed bee packages. When you order a package of bees, they come in a screen box the size of a shoe box. Inside the box all of the worker bees are crawling around in a big cluster. In the center of the cluster is a smaller screen cage the size of a D cell battery with a queen in it. They are separated at this point because the bees are not familiar with the queen and are under stress. In such a scenario the bees could very easily regard her as an intruder and kill her. When you install the bees in the hive, you open the package, and shake the bees out of the package so they fall into the hive. You then hang the queen cage from one of the top bars, close up the hive, and leave them alone for a few days. There is a piece of sugar candy plugging a hole at one end of the queen's cage, which the bees will eat until its gone. The hope is that by the time they've eaten through the candy they will have grown accustom to her and accepted her as their queen. Once the queen is out of the cage, it's important to remove the queen cage from the hive or the bees could start building comb on the cage that is oriented in the wrong direction.
My trip down to the ranch yesterday was to check if the queens had left their cages and, if so, to remove the cages. Two of the hive appeared to have had successfully integrated their queens, so I removed those cages. A third hive still had a queen in the cage because the candy hadn't been fully consumed, so I put it back in the hive. The forth cage had a dead queen in it, which was quite disappointing because I had already had one dead queen in the bee package I tried to install in my back yard the day before. The queen in the package from the day before had been dead on arrival, but this queen appeared to have been killed by the bees in the hive.
My trip down to the ranch yesterday was to check if the queens had left their cages and, if so, to remove the cages. Two of the hive appeared to have had successfully integrated their queens, so I removed those cages. A third hive still had a queen in the cage because the candy hadn't been fully consumed, so I put it back in the hive. The forth cage had a dead queen in it, which was quite disappointing because I had already had one dead queen in the bee package I tried to install in my back yard the day before. The queen in the package from the day before had been dead on arrival, but this queen appeared to have been killed by the bees in the hive.