# Introducing virgin queen to nuc.



## ruthiesbees (Aug 27, 2013)

I've had pretty good luck with getting the bees distracted with powdered sugar and running her in with a dribble of raw honey on her body. by the time everyone is cleaned up, she's good friends with all of them. Have always done this with nucs and not full size hives.


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## BroncoVol74 (Jul 12, 2016)

Ralph Jones III has a ton of videos on introducing virgin queens to nucs.


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## yousowise (Apr 14, 2011)

I watched his videos a couple years ago and tried his method (which is nothing just direct release the virgin). I had 6 out of 10 balled and killed. Maybe my nucs weren't queenless long enough, or there were too many older field bees in them??? Looking for a method with a better success rate. The powder sugar sounds promising, anyone else have any experience with this?


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## BjornH (Nov 8, 2013)

Ive put the cells in both as 48-hours and as five days ( just or almost covered) when time is not in my favor.. I would say put them in earlier if its ok for you. Just handle the cells extra carefully. I my small operation my conclusion is that if a nuc is totally queenless att least an hour or two they are happy for anything close to a queen.


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## bee keeper chef (Nov 1, 2015)

I try to release virgins the day they emerge they don't have any pheromone smell yet, I prefer ripe cells Powder sugar works or I have dipped her in honey not drown her just a lite coating they clean her of and all is good if you get her just as she emerges smoke the front and run her in. A full size hive does not work well smaller nucs are best


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## McCoslin (Dec 4, 2013)

I just direct released 20 virgins last week-end. When you make up your Nuc make sure you have a frame of open nectar included. Wait at least two hours after making up your Nuc; pull the frame with open nectar and set it on top of the Nuc. Let the Virgin crawl out of cage directly on top of open nectar. She will put her head down immediately and start feeding. Usually the bees will pay little attention to her at first, then come over and start tending to her. You can observe for several minutes to see if things are going well. I learned this method from Lauri Miller, she has a video on you tube on this release method and you can look it up on beesource. So far (knock on wood) 100%. The two times I had the bees start balling a queen, there was another queen in the Nuc. This happened to me last weekend when I tore down a hive that had just swarmed and there were 3 virgins running around in this hive. I scooped up the virgins that the workers were starting to ball right away and installed them in another Nuc without problems.


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## bentonkb (May 24, 2016)

I'm going to try this in a few weeks, so I'm curious about your results. There is a journal article out there somewhere that covers a bunch of different queen introduction methods. I think they found that introducing queen cells had a pretty high success rate. Introducing virgins in newly queenless hives with no smoke had a pretty low success rate. Introducing virgins in hives that had been queenless for at least 48 hours and using heavy smoke was almost as good as using cells.


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## rniles (Oct 10, 2012)

I think if the nuc is full of young fresh bees, they accept a virgin queen much better ... as the age of the bees increase or if you have mix of older and younger bees, it seems to get more difficult. For that, I've switched to introduce queen cells .. but I'm definitely interested in all your techniques because I'd like to use virgin queens more often.


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## yousowise (Apr 14, 2011)

Introduced 9 queens yesterday nucs were queenless overnight. I placed the queen cage on the top bars and left for 5 minutes to judge reaction of bees. Some cages were covered with bees and some were totally ignored. Then direct released, 2 were balled on release and I recaged. One was killed through the cage. The cages that were ignored were all accepted the problems were with some of the ones covered with bees but not all of them.


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## jwcarlson (Feb 14, 2014)

Dunk in honey water and plop them on the comb, judge reaction. The nice part about virgin queens is I usually have "too many" of them so they're kind of expendable. I hold back a few cells so that I can go around and make sure I didn't have any misses or "fly aways" which sometimes seems to happen.


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