Why Virgin Queens: Virgin Queens Take the Throne Best

Why Virgin Queens: Virgin Queens Take the Throne Best

We wrote the book on using virgin queens successfully, literally!

ABJ Trevor Bawden Published Article 2022

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We love using virgin queens in our operation so much, that we stopped using queen cells in our mating nucs completely. While it may sound difficult to beekeepers to install a virgin queen, it’s actually very similar to installing a mated queen. Lately we have received a lot of questions from everyone about virgin queens. We thought we would post some of them here for everyone to review:

How do I introduce a virgin queen?

I wrote an article on the how and why of using virgin queens in American Bee Journal, May edition 2022. You can download the PDF of the article here.

I want to split my colony, can I use a virgin queen?Yes, you can use a virgin queen to make a nuc, but you can’t use one to divide a large double deep colony in half. We suggest you buy three or more virgin queens to divide your large colony into multiple small nucs.

I want to requeen my colony, can I use a virgin queen?

We only recommend using the virgin queens when making up nucs instead of trying to use the virgin queens to requeen large colonies. We would advise using the whole nuc once the queen is mated to requeen the larger colonies via a newspaper combine. This is what we do in our o