Is a hive queenless? What to look for

Below is a list of things to watch for if trying to determine if a hive is queenless. 

Keep in mind there can be other circumstances which give the behaviours as well.

For example, bees can be antsy, aggressive and sting if they're upset from predation activity such as robbing, or skunks or racoon attacks.  And brood cells can be filled with nectar if the hive doesn't have enough supers.

No queen:

• All the cells where brood should be are filled with nectar during the flow times and no brood in the hive
• Antsy and aggressive behaviour with stinging when opening or inspecting the hive
• Bees running and buzzing with anxiety when inner cover opened
• No pollen going in
• No eggs or young brood
• Population decrease
• Decrease in activity
• No cleaning in the hive, removal of garbage
• No guarding (when population is really low)
• Put your ear on the hive and listen.  If there is anxious buzzing that can be a sign of queenlessness.

Have a queen:

• Calm
• Good hum - like a nice machine sound - rhythmic and relaxing sound.  You can put your ear on the hive and listen. The sound of a queenless have has notes of anxiety in the hum and doesn't sound relaxing,
• Pollen going in
• Population increasing
• Good activity on the outside with bees coming and going
• Guarding entrances and washboarding entrances
• Cleaning and doing chores such as removal of dead bees and garbage

Problems with Queens

I'm seeing a repeat of last summer's problem.  The bees just can't keep their queens alive.

In spring they requeen as usual.  I do my best to do splits on the stronger hives to prevent swarming and losing precious bees.

Sometimes in spring the requeening fails and they make another.  I often give them a frame of eggs (with the nurse bees on the frame) to keep them going if they're running out of brood.

This summer, most of my hives have been constantly requeening all summer long.  Here I am in mid Aug and I have at least six of 16 hives that are in the middle of requeening.  The other remaining hives have successfully requeened.

Two of the hives have utterly failed.  They had queens hatch out, I even saw them in the hive, but then shortly after they no longer had a queen.  She either didn't make it back from going out to mate or she somehow failed in the hive.  They have no eggs or brood of any kind.  These bees are antsy.  They run, buzz loudly and are quick to sting.  They're upset and with good reason.

  They're doomed unless there's an intervention.

Normally since it's so late in the year these hives would be blended with other hives.  But I'm a hobby beekeeper and a rescuer so I bought some queens.  I've installed two on the worst hives.

One strong but queen and eggless hive I gave a frame of eggs, larvae and bees from their mother hive that they were originally split from a couple years back.  DNA seems important because the bees took two eggs and moved them and created two queen cells to put them in.

These cells are now capped and I'm counting the days to the hatching.  Now take note that when I gave this hive the frame of eggs from their mother, I transplanted two lovely not yet capped queen cells from another hive.  A week later I came back to find they had chewed out the introduced queen cells.  It seems this hive wants to use the DNA of their mother hive to create their own queen instead.  So I'm going to let this play out to see if they're successful.


At this stage I don't expect to take any more honey from the hive because once they're rolling again they'll need whatever honey they can store for winter.


Another hive has 5 capped queen cells and capped brood.  The capped brood tells me that sometime in the last 10 to 24 days there was a queen laying eggs in that hive.  She has obviously failed in some way and they are replacing her.  I'm watching these cells as well.  This has been my best hive that I've had for seven years.  I'd prefer to keep this gene going because it's a strong one for really good bees.


Last week while in the bee yard a person was there going for a nature walk.  She told me my bees had swarmed and there was a clump of them on the pine tree.  I asked her to call me if she ever saw that again and pointed to my phone number posted on a sign in my yard.  (Silently saying to myself damn it why didn't you call me!!!!)


The difficult part with giving frames of eggs and bees at this time of year is having to lift off honey boxes to dig down to the nest.  I hate doing that as ultimately bees get squished and the boxes are heavy.  I don't want to remove honey just yet and there's a reason why.


Last year in the fall when I went to take more honey off I found the bees had almost none.  They had been requeening all last summer, their numbers were low and so they were weak and couldn't bring in enough honey for themselves, let alone for me too.  I had to give boxes to them from other hives.  So this year I'm being very careful about how much honey I take.


It's a difficult balancing act.  None of us wants to see a hive fail.

A Smart Critter is an Annoying Critter

At the Pines there are some pretty smart Raccoons.

I had thought I outsmarted them.  But they have proved me wrong.  Again.

Originally I would occasionally leave an empty sticky honey pail on top of a hive for the bees to lick out.  This would be a hive that was stacked five supers high or more.

I'd come back to the yard days later to find the pails licked clean, but on the ground.  I had secured them with bricks.  Many other times I've found the bricks on my hives pushed to the ground.

Recently I left an empty deep on the platform weighted with many bricks on top.  I came back to find all its frames strewed on the ground.  The raccoon(s) had rolled the deep repeatedly until the frames spilled out of it and then they chewed up the combs.

That was frustrating.

So then I had the ingenious idea to use an old rabbit hutch.  It has a cage front and I'd put stuff inside and the bees would fly in and lick things dry.  Perfect!

A few weeks ago, dad cleaned out the cappings tank and because of a pail shortage the cappings were put in a garbage bag.  I then took the bag to the Pines for the bees to lick the wax clean.

I put the garbage bag inside the rabbit hutch--the one with the locked cage front.

Last week I discovered the entire bag had been torn to shreds with pieces strewn on the ground.  Not a single piece of wax remained.  The little beggars had somehow stuck their paws through the bars and pulled the bag to the edge where they were able to shred it.

They had eaten a whole season's worth of beeswax.

I could only hope it gave them indigestion.

Seven of Ten

When you first start off with your package or nuc of bees they'll be busy building combs in their frames.  You will most likely give them sugar water to help them build faster.

Without the sugar they'd have to do a lot of foraging to get the energy to produce the beeswax. 

The question will arise, when do I add the next box to the hive?  The general rule is 7 of 10.  This applies both to comb building and also to honey supering.

When seven frames are drawn with comb it's time for the next box of frames.  When seven frames are filled with honey/capping in progress, it's time to add the next box.

I read about this seven of ten rule in my favourite beekeeping book, Beekeeping for Dummies.

My first queen graft

I took the queen rearing course offered by the OBA Tech Team a couple years ago.  They offer great courses and they're very patient teachers.

If you're in Ontario I highly recommend them.  Course info can be found on the Ontario Bee Association's web site at http://www.ontariobee.com/.

It was a very worthwhile course and gave tons of hands on practise.  But that was two years ago.  I haven't done queen rearing since taking the course so I wasn't feeling very confident.

I have the manual which came with the course and I've started reading it.  But I'm a slow reader and time isn't on my side.

I've got queenless hives - my good, strong hives and I don't want to risk losing them.

The beeyard in question is Pines where I had 5 hives of 10 survive the winter.  I split one hive to make six.

Inspections to date and instinct proved me right that four of the six hives have queens.  Two need some extra help.

Three days ago I took a frame that had a small area with eggs and leaving the bees on the frame I popped it into the queenless hive.  Now they had eggs so they could make a queen cell.  Or move an egg into a cell (not sure if bees do that but I've heard that they do).

When I checked today there were no signs of queen cell development.  When examining the frame I noticed that larvae were newly hatched.  The top super had queen cups with nothing in them.

So I took my Chinese grafting tool (at the end of the course day they had draws and I won this).  There's a tiny pad of plastic at the bottom slides under the larvae and then the other end is the plunger to eject the larvae once placed in the bottom of a queen cup.

I put my magnifying headset on and set to work.  There was plenty of sunlight so I didn't need the headlamp to see.  I managed to pick up 4 and placed them into 4 cups.

I know that larvae can't be flipped over because they only have breathing holes on the up side of their body, so if inserting into a cup you flip them over they would drown in the royal jelly.

It took less than five minutes for the bees to notice the larvae in the cups.

It's very delicate work and I don't know if I did it well, being my first try.  But time will tell.  I'll check back in four or five days to see if the grafting took.

Questions to ask when the Swarm phone call comes

I got two swarm calls last year.

Last year was a slow year for swarms.  The year before that I was getting so many swarm calls that I was passing them on to other beekeeping friends.  I had collected about ten myself.  That was a fun spring.

This year has been super slow.  I guess I'm out of practise which explains how I goofed up on the call today.

The cell rang and a man said he had a small swarm of bees under a table on his deck.  He reported checking underneath and seeing their brown combs.

Well, that confirmed it for me.... see how out of practise I was with phone work regarding swarms.  People don't lie, they just don't know anything about bees or what combs should look like.  We need to question them to find out more.

The good news is that I asked him to send me a photo.  The photo above is what he sent.

So to help you when you get calls here are some questions that can help shorten the phone call.  Of course a photo is always best, either of the hive or the insect.

1. Are they fuzzy, brown and black? (view photos on the web site - feel free to refer to mine at http://www.bee-magic.com/beeswarms.aspx where there's photos of bumble bees, honey bees, yellow jackets and bald faced hornets)
2. Have you seen them bringing pollen on their legs?
3. Is the hive round and looks like brown paper with a hole at the bottom (paper wasp nest)?
4. What size is the swarm on the tree?  Baseball, football, volleyball, baseketball sized?  How high off the ground is it?
5. How large is the area they are coming and going from?  Honey bees need lots of space to build a nest.

If you have questions you like to ask, feel free to add them in the comments below.

Healing Properties of Honey

 

While at my bee supplier's we got to talking as usual about bees.  He showed me a picture of a horse's injured foreleg.

 

The owners were struggling to save the horse's badly injured and infected leg.  If it couldn't be saved the horse would have to be put down.  They tried antibiotics but they weren't working.  Thank goodness they heard about the power of honey to cure wounds.  They used honey on the wounds and the horse's leg healed and was saved.  The picture was of the horse's healed leg.

 

I'm sure you've heard about the antibacterial and antifungal power of honey.

 

The ancient Egyptians knew all about honey and now modern medicine is learning to turn back time and use ancient methods when modern ones fail.

 

I've seen documentaries in hospitals where leeches were used to keep blood flowing through reattached fingers.  If not for the leeches work to keep the blood flowing through the reattached limb, the person would lose their finger.

 

Now, back to honey.  I was watching one of my favourite shows on Animal Planet called Supervet.  There was a dog's paw that was badly crushed.  The vet had to take pieces of bone from the dog's hip to create new foot bones.  It was a really complicated surgery.  As often happens after an invasive surgery tht takes a long time to heal the dog's paw eventually became infected.  They were using antibiotics and they weren't working very well.

 

The Supervet (who really knows his stuff) used Manuka honey.  I watched as he poured the honey into and onto the wounds.  And I'm sure you know the outcome.  The dogs paw healed up beautifully.  The vet is using medical grade Manuka honey for his clients but all honeys have healing powers because of their antibacterial and antifungal properties.

 

Manuka plant (also called tea tree) is well known to be a powerful healing agent because of the properties of the manuka plant itself which is in the honey.

 

Manuka honey is often used by hospitals to put on foot ulcer's of diabetic patients.  These ulcers are hard to heal and often don't respond to antibiotics.  That's when honey steps in to save the day, and the patient's foot.

 

Manuka/Tea Tree honey is harvested in New Zealand and southeastern Australia.  Manuka honey is highly valued and sells at a premium to medical organizations.