One hive was doing well in early spring but I did notice as the weeks went by that the number of bees was dwindling. This is a clear sign to do a check for brood. It may be nothing but then again it can be the first sign of a queenless hive.
It's not necessary to tear the whole hive apart to find the queen. Instead focus on evidence that she's there. Such as: Eggs are the best if you can see them. They hatch in three days. A day1 egg sits totally upright, a day2 egg has a slant as it begins to lie flat, a day3 egg lays flat in the cell. Tiny larvae are great too, indicating brood that are only a few days old. The chubbier the larvae the older they are.
Capped brood is at least a sign that there was a queen producing brood with the last week or more.
A sign I have found when a hive is queenless is when the centre of the frames in the middle of each box are all filled with nectar. Also there will be a lack of brood of any kind and often little or no pollen either.
How to resolve this? If it's very early spring there won't be local queens for sale yet. In Ontario beekeepers buy imported queens from either Australia or Chile. That's one option is to give the bees a mated queen. She'll be ready to lay right away once accepted. This will avoid a month dip in productivity.
If there are no eggs at all or brood there are a couple problems that can happen. One is the lack of brood and their pheromones means that a worker could start to act like a queen and lay eggs--except they'd all be drone eggs. The bees also aren't so productive without the brood pheromone pushing them to bring in the pollen. The other bigger problem is that the bees can't make a new queen without eggs.
So give them both brood and eggs from another hive. I go to a good hive and choose a frame with young larvae, capped cells and most importantly eggs. I check the frame carefully to make sure there's no queen on board. Then I transfer the frame, bees and all into the queenless hive.
I take a frame from the queenless hive to switch over (removing the bees first) or I'll give them a blank frame to draw comb on. A drawn frame is best though so the queen in the good hive can start laying right away to replace the workers I removed.
Believe it or not the bees in the queenless hive don't get to fighting. They're young nurse bees. After putting anywhere from one to three frames from some of my hives (I don't steal that many frames from one hive) I've watched how within an hour the bees have gotten themselves organized.
They'll start guarding when before they weren't, they'll start cleaning and taking out the dead. They get focussed and get to work. The brood pheromone keeps them motivated.
The advice from experienced beekeepers is to give them a frame of uncapped brood every two weeks until they have a queen. At this point the idea is to keep the brood pheromone in the hive by continually supplying them with brood. Also as the cells are capped they'll hatch out over the weeks increasing the number of workers in the hive.
I've followed this advice and it worked very well. I'm doing it now with one of my hives.
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7 comments:
Thank you for this idea! I have 2 hives: one strong, one queenless (had one before, but now no capped brood or sign of eggs). This is what I will try.
Jen: This works really well. I'm glad I could help. Don't forget to come back and let us know how it works out.
Will do. I successfully moved a frame full of capped brood today, carefully scanning to make sure the queen was not on it. Sometime next week, I'll check on them. I have a hunch it will work, because the queenless hive still had a good number of bees. The good hive is so strong, it will never miss that frame.
Jen, that's great. Also be sure to find a frame of eggs so they can make a queen AND you want open "wet" brood - uncapped brood. It's those uncapped larvae that put out the feed me pheromone that keeps the workers motivated and stops a worker from becoming a layer. The bees can make a queen from a larvae thats 1 to 4 days old (younger is better so that's why eggs are best).
They have a queen now aparently- multiple frames with capped brood. So they are up and running again! They must have already had a queen who wasn't yet laying, since that was only 8 days ago. Either way is good news.
That's great news Jen. Many of my hives right now are in the process of requeening so there's no eggs until the virgin queens finish mating. It's still a good idea that you kept the brood pheromone going during that gap in time :) Thanks for the follow-up.
I did notice, as you said, that they got organized almost immediately. Their patterns seemed more aimless before.
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