A Queenless Hive in Spring

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.

Q&A - Phone Call with an Expert

My beekeeping friend and mentor, Henry Heimstra, called. He wanted an update on how the bees were doing. He came to the bee yard at the end of July to see the bees and gave them a glowing report (I was SO proud of them!).

At that time the bees were creating supercedure cells and so we let the bees make themselves new queens - and that has happened.

I was glad to have Henry on the phone and quickly pulled out my question list (he might not know I keep a question list but I do :)

Q - Should there be brood at this time of year? A - Yes. The queen should be laying still to build up numbers for overwintering.

Q - Is it a problem that the bees seem to have put nectar into almost every available cell? (I think this is preventing the queen from laying). A - The bees will move the nectar.

Now, that answer certainly caused me to have a DUH! moment. Of course the bees would move the nectar. They're smart. They would know that 200 cells half filled isn't as good as 100 cells totally filled and then capped! I'm glad the bees are in charge here and not me!

Q - When can honey supers be extracted? A - Anytime. In Southwestern Ontario the nectar flows are finished by the second week of September (when the Western Fair is on in London).

Q - Is observing bees coming and going with purpose, doing orienting flights usually a sign that a queen is present? A - Yes.

Q - Is it a problem that the bees haven't collected much pollen? A - If there's lots of nectar available they will focus mostly on gathering that.

Henry commented that if very small lumps of pollen are being brought in it's often a sign of queenlessness. I was glad to see large lumps of pollen being brought into Hive 2 on Monday - that was the hive where I haven't seen the queen but it's now very active.

I told him I put the undrawn frames in the yellow super underneath the purple super which is full of honey and he confirmed that was a good move. Tomorrow I'll head out to the yard and switch them on Hive 2 as well.

And now for a commercial and an invite for all of you to come to Aylmer, Ontario on Sat 29 August 2009, for the Bee Olympics. It's held at the Heimstra's apiary called Clovermead (started by Henry back in the 70's). I attended last year and got some great photos of our beekeeping instructors wearing beards of bees. You can see photos from last year's competition on my Bee Beard blog. I'll be volunteering there this year answering any bee related questions that people might ask in the observation hive room. They have the largest observation hive in Canada - I think it must be about 30 frames - an entire wall. I'll blog on that of course so stay tuned :)