Rob-Roy

Queenless Hive

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I had a look thru my hives, this glorious warm and sunny afternoon in south Ayrshire, of which I have 4; Starting off the year with 2 hives and watching them progress thru the warm April to near swarming stage I decided to artificially swarm them. This went quite surprisingly smoothly with a few silly errors tooooo silly to post.
However I believe that 1 of the hives had it in its mind to swarm so it did and left me with more or less a neuk of beez, on the original site, with no Queen but they did what they did with a little sugar syrup feeding and reared a new Queen and are progressing just fine The artificial swarm is doing just fine as well.The other hive artificially swarmed and all going well but last week for some reason I couldn't find any eggs or brood. I did find an opened Queen cell and thought that all would be well and there would be a virgin Queen out having a ball and all would be well in a few days. However this afternoon I inspected the aforementioned hive and I find it still Queenless. Why is it Queenless because apart from not finding a Queen, and my Queen finding talents are not that great, there is no egg laying and no brood. !!!!!!!
Now this hive has a lot of bees, a lot of pollen, a fair amount of honey not yet sealed, the bees are enjoying the warmer sunny and dryer conditions of the past few days and are working as well as the other 3 hives in the apiary. What should I do???
Should advertise for a Queen and requeen it?
Should I take a frame of sealed brood from another hive, of which there are plenty, and put it in the Queenless hive?
Should I wait for the Queencup that I found, with an egg in the bottom, and wait for the emergant virgin to return, mated?

Any advice would be welcome, thank you.

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Comments

  1. gavin's Avatar
    Hi R-R and welcome to the forum. It may be that all you need is patience. Virgins in a prosperous colony can take 4-5 weeks to come into lay. Is it that long since she hatched? If the bees are very restless that may be a sign that they are hopelessly queenless. If they are calm and preparing a clear area of polished cells surrounded by an arc of pollen-containing cells then they will probably have a queen ready to start laying soon.

    The usual test for queenlessness is to give them a frame with some eggs to see if they want to raise a new one.
  2. Rob-Roy's Avatar
    Thanks Gavin.
    I must admit that now as you emtion there was quite a noticable amount of shiny cells just waiting for an egg which I was struggling to understand.
    My biggest fear was that the bees might die off before a new Queen got to work and there wouldn't be enough bees to nurture the eggs to hatching.
    Do the bees possibly know that a new Queen is not in the vicinity and thats why they are nurturing a new Queen cup with an egg in it just as a safe guard, thats what made me think about introducing a new Queen.
  3. Jon's Avatar
    My biggest fear was that the bees might die off before a new Queen got to work
    bees live much longer when they have no brood to rear. That is why winter bees can last so long.
  4. Rob-Roy's Avatar
    When would be the very latest it would be considered viable to do an artificial swarm or to take a neuk from a very strong hive?