Do Queens Lay in Winter?
2025-04-12
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Written by : Suzanne Wiebe
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What We Learned – Feeding Caged Queens
April 2025, we purchased 20 early queens. These queens were in JZBZ cages, with attendants.
The queens came with sugar plugs. Over the first 24 hours we fed them sugar water and water, every 3 hours through the day.
After 24 hours (they had been caged 2 days) in our incubator a few of the queens were piping.
We added a little hive alive fondant, and within 30 minutes the queens stopped pipping. We never realized that the queens had been making noise constantly, until about 5 hours after they were fed the hive alive.
To us, this signifies that the queens were not getting enough nutrient value, or carbs, from the fondant and were hungry.
Picking Up Queen Bees
Picking up queen bees is exciting, and stressful. They can endure a lot, but they are also stressed.
Queen bees can endure:
- The wrong temperature.
- The wrong humidity. Going too long without water.
- Being in sunlight.
But these things can also kill an entire shipment of queens.
Our method of transporting Queen Bees.
We transport them in a Styrofoam incubator that works off John’s truck.
The temperature is set between 88C and the humidity is set at 50%.
The first thing we do is give them water, with about 20% sugar in it.
We cover the observation windows on the incubator. The incubator is kept humid using a damp cloth.
The #1 concern is that the incubator doesn’t go above 92%. This is a number we have reached by trial and error.
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