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We at Hidden Springs Apiary are raising Italian Queens. We are striving for gentleness, color, and pattern.

This is the process of caging the new Queen to be shipped, when a beekeeper orders a Queen she will arrive in this wooden cage with 5 attendants. This is just a small block of wood with three circular hollow chambers. There is a candy plug in one end, thus giving the bees something to feed the Queen with while in transit, and which needs to be eaten out, to release the queen.

Both ends of the cage has been drilled out one end has been pluged up with a cork and candy plug, and after the Queen and her attendants are placed inside the other end is pluged up with another cork, which is removed by the beekeeper, before placing in hive.

Once in the new hive the bees can "smell" the new Queen inside the cage. They will soon start to eat the candy plug that is sealing up the tunnel so that the Queen can get out and enter her new home.

You might ask why the beekeeper does not let her out of the cage right away when he puts the cage in her new home ? Since she has never lived in this particular hive she does not yet "smell" just like the other bees that live here. Because she is a stranger, so to speak, the bees in this hive would kill her if she were let loose right away, as she doesn't "belong" to this hive just yet (she does not have the hive "smell").

During the time that it takes the bees that already live in the hive to eat the candy plug and free her to leave the cage, her unique "smell" and the "smell" of this hive will have intermingled and she will then be accepted by the bees as one of them (she will by then be one of the family).