Hi people's!
For those in Melbourne and Victoria out of interest what is the earliest you requeen your hives?
I get my queens from QLD, last year I did them around November..
Cheers
Ben
I'm only a newbee, but after one of my hives requeened itself in May and fortunately got mated and kept 3 frames both sides half full of brood right thru the winter, and is going like crazy now, I think I will requeen about April so there are lots of young bees to go thru the winter and they fire up as soon as the weather warms. I'm about to try grafting as soon as we get some drones flying, (to do some splits,) so if I get new queens out of that I will leave them until April 2014 unless they are under performing. (Near Wagga, a bit colder than Melb)
Squid, ideal time is when you're on a flow... so when you've got some nectar coming in then they should accept a new queen pretty readily - if you're new to re-queening etc i'd suggest making a split with the old queen in a nuc first and then once your new queen has been accepted you can either remove the old queen - combine the nuc back in to the re-queened hive or just get a second hive :)