Dead queen today

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I went up to check my bees this afternoon and found them to be flying well bringing in pollen.

By half past three it had cooled a little and all the colonies were quiet except one which seemed to have bees taking orientation flights.

This continued for 15 minutes even though the other colonies had no activity so I went to have a closer look and found the marked queen dead on the landing board.

This was the colony where I made a post about poisoned bees on 3rd October. I checked the colony on the 4th and the queen was ok. That was the last time I opened it until today.
When I checked today after finding the queen, the bees were giving out a queenless roar.
There were about five frames of mostly sealed brood in a good tight pattern including small larvae under 24 hours. I didn't see eggs but I just had a quick look.
I noticed they had started to draw out a queen cell.
There was no sign of a supersedure queen and the behaviour of the colony would not have suggested this anyway.
This was a 2009 queen which hatched in August last year. It is the mother (31) of most of those queens whose scattergrams I posted recently in the drawWing thread.
This queen was laying well a couple of days ago and must have died quite unexpectedly.

Any ideas?
If it was poisoning she laid really well for three weeks after the incident so I doubt if that were the problem. The only possible hint is that her tongue was out. (see pic above)

There was no visible problem with wings, feet or antennae and she did not look like she had been balled.

I have had half a dozen queens go missing since the start of September so I am a little worried. This is the first one I have found dead.

The colony is (was) one of my strongest and is packed out with stores.

PS Doris:
You asked in another thread about banding.
That is what I would call a queen with banding.

Hi Jon

Sorry to hear about one of your favourite queens.

Poisoning has to be a possibility with the nice day today and yesterday enticing them out, possibly to what they found before. Maybe she was lucky and her attendents were getting good supplies before, but this time it was straight from the toxic source? But if that was the case then there would be other corpses too.

Or some pestilence affecting the queen, maybe a virus or possibly Nosema. Only a specialist lab, probably only the NBU in the UK, could consider screening for a range of viruses. On the other hand, both Nosema and acarine are quite easy to diagnose in workers at least. Both would shorten her life too.

At about 17 months old it shouldn't be old age that caused her demise.

best wishes

Gavin

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Originally Posted by gavin

Sorry to hear about one of your favourite queens.

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Yeah. Just being sentimental. This was also my main queenright queen rearing colony this year. I have 6 daughters and one grand daughter so I haven't lost the genetics.

I have a frozen sample of a hundred bees from 3 weeks ago but when I checked with the local lab they said they could only check for nosema and tracheal mite.
There were no other dead bees or obvious problems today.
I'll stick the queen in the freezer and get tests done later if possible.

Jon, Odd that she just fell off her perch so to speak; you would think there would be a period of poor laying or drone laying or some sign that she was on the way out. When I've had queens go missing - not many - a couple come to mind - it would appear that they have been in the hive and giving of pheromone for a while as usually there are no queencells and no eggs, just older larvae perhaps and sealed brood.

Jon,

As you know I have seen this happen may times, but have never seen the queen. I'm not sure if it is the same problem though.

It's difficult to know what to suggest, but I think you er right to put her in the freezer.

I think NBU or anyone else will want an idea of what the chemical was.

Roger Patterson.

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Originally Posted by Adam

Jon, Odd that she just fell off her perch so to speak;

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Yes indeed, and the bees were agitated as this was obviously unexpected. There were about 10 sides at least half covered with brood which is a lot for this time of year.
In my experience when a colony has some ailment, the queen is often one of the last bees left alive as they seem to know how to keep bees with trachael mite or nosema away from her. No other dead bees today either.

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As you know I have seen this happen may times, but have never seen the queen. I'm not sure if it is the same problem though.

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I just happened to be there at the moment she got chucked out. Dead bees are often carried quite a distance away and anything on the ground at the moment get dismembered by wasps pretty quickly.
Sometimes when I have lost a queen I have convinced myself that I must have killed her during an inspection but there have been several times, including this one, where the dates mean I could not possibly be to blame.


As the Duchess of Windsor said, you can never be too thin or too rich - or have too many spare queens in Apideas! Only two left though.
I will wait till they seal queen cells and try and requeen with an Apidea next weekend.

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fell off her perch so to speak

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PS Adam, I didn't miss that reference to Norwegian Blues, but this one was definitely an Ulster Black and God knows what it was pining for.

I just came to this thread after having been away for a few days. I wonder if the poison had been stored with pollen or honey and has recently been consumed and transferred to the queen.

I have always understood that suspected poisoning was reportable (but not compulsorily) in the UK and that the NBU would test for it for free.

Rosie

I checked this colony today and the queen I introduced at the start of the week in a cage plugged with fondant was sitting happily in the middle of a frame so hopefully this one should overwinter well now as it has plenty of bees and stores. I would still rather have kept the old queen but such is life. The new one is her daughter from a larvae I grafted at the end of June. I noticed some yellow looking bees among her offspring so I will likely change this one early next year when I have more queens.
Requeening in November is not what you want to be doing so I am just happy that the colony is queenright again.

Hi Jon
I had to do the same thing last w/end, my 3-4 year old favourite queen that I had been breeding from was brought home from an out apiary back late summer in a nuc with bees and brood with a view to getting her through the winter for one or two more rounds of grafts from her. Last w.end however she was on the hive floor dead and a scrawny virgin was running around in the hive, so I squashed her and united a Mini nuc to them by opening the floor and putting it over the feed hole with newspaper in the gap. This has worked before so will check tomorrow and see if they are o/k. Always a shame to loose a favourite.
kev

There seems to be a lot of late supersedure where the chance of a virgin getting mated is minimal.
I thought at first this might have been a supersedure but all I found a week later was a few emergency queen cells.
One problem I have noticed requeening by removing the floor of an Apidea is that the queen is sometimes still in the Apidea a week after uniting.
When this happens I lift out the Apidea frame with the queen and let her walk on to one of the frames in the brood box.