- Today, I'm going to talk to you about caring for your caged queen. When you order a queen, and you get her directly from the bee breeder, or you get her through the mail, you're going to get a little box like this, and inside is a queen, and in our case, we put five attendants in there. You can see it's a nice sturdy box; it's well-ventilated, and at one end, there's a plug, and underneath the plug, there is candy. The worker bees will feed and look after the queen as long as she's in this cage, and so the only thing that's missing is water. So when you receive the queens, you're going to want give them a drink, and I'm going to show you how to do that. Now, you want to keep the water away from the candy end. So, I take the box like this; this is the end with the core. You just put your finger into some water, shake off any extra drops, and just gently place that on the cage, and they'll come up and get a drink. The thing that you don't want to do is get water and slide your finger along the screening because, in that case, if the queen happens to be hanging by her feet, from the mesh, you could actually sheer off her tarsals. So after you give them each a drink, you're going to just set them aside, make sure they're well-separated from each other, so if they somehow did get knocked, that they're not close enough to sting each other or kill each other. You're going to want to set them in a room, a dark room, where there's no drafts, no pets, a quiet place at room temperature and just leave them there until the next day. Once you have your queen on site, that's when you're going to want go out and deal with your old queen, get your old queen out of the hive or make your splits. And once you do that, you're going to leave them for about 24 hours for the queen pheromone of the old queen to just dissipate, and then, you're going to take your queen, this queen, out the next day, so leave it about 24 hours. Now, before you install her, you're going to want to take the cork out, and I'm going to show you how to do that. This is the only way that the queen's going to be able to be released out of this cage. So, it just comes out like that, and then underneath, you can see that there is the candy plug. Now, you're not going to want to disturb, once you put this new queen into the hive, it's really, really important, and I know it's hard to do, but you're supposed to wait about a week until you go and look and see if she was accepted. If you disturb a queen at this critical time in the hive, the workers can ball her and kill her, so it's best just to leave her alone for about a week. Now, the actual physical place where you're going to install this new queen and exactly how you're going to do that can be seen in our other video that's called "Requeening," so I suggest that you go and watch that one also. I hope you've enjoyed this, and thank you for watching.