I went in to my hive yesterday and NO queen lot's of drone cell's and cell's with multiple egg's :shock: so today I'm on a queen quest I will have to drive about 105 mile's one way to get one.
From your description it sounds like you have a laying worker hive. I hope I am wrong. If you do, this didn't happen overnight and unless you are very lucky just putting a queen in there is not going to cure it. If I remember right (50/50 chance), you only have one hive, so nothing to rob brood/eggs from. Look at Michael Bush's site on laying workers and do a search on here for education on the problem.
Good luck, Rick
Irwin, I agree with rast 100%. Go to Michael's site.
If you only have one hive and it has a laying worker, the long term prognosis does not look good. Brian will have some good advice as well.
Good luck!!
Steve
I just had a laying worker problem and read Mchael's site. A local beek told me there is a chance that when you introduce the queen the laying worker will stop and go back to working. He told me he has done this with success. I tried it and it appears to be working but I do agree and follow Michael's website info first. I was going to do a shake of the frames away from the hive as someone had suggeested in the forums.
I did not know I had laying workers and introduced a wonderful laying, mated queen. They killed her and then I figured it all out. Adding frames of open brood from another hive will suppress the laying workers after about 3 weeks but if you do not have this option, then perhaps the only course of action would be to shake them out away from the hive, then introduce a good, mated queen and hope for the best.
Yes, read Michael's web site to see exactly how to do this. Good luck
Annette
you may want to try and cut a metal queen exculder down to fit the entrance of the hive and shake all the drones out after they have hatched. by the way make dang sure you don't shake the queen out.
If you have a laying worker and other hives, putting a frame of brood from one of the other hives, or a frame from each, will help keep the population up, possible cause the bees to make queen cells, and/or make it easier to introduce a new queen. A frame of brood can't be beat when refurbing a LW hive. Too late in the year to let them do their own, so keeping the hive going and more acceptable to a queen is important.
Ok I read the book "Hive Management" by Richard Bonney. He says hat a laying worker is not caused overnight and usually has been caused by weeks of no queen. He says somethig to the affect that if there has been a laying worker for a long period of time the drones would be smaller and lots of them. On my last inspection I did see lots of drones but they seemed as if they were trying to win a contect of who is the biggest. I noticed a lot less drone cells but at the time the queen had not laid any eggs that I could see. Mr. Bonney said if the colony has gone to far with the laying worker it may not be worth the trouble in trying to save them and to let them die naturally. I have my queen in and we still have another month of warm weather so hopefully the queen can turn things around, if there is enough house bees.
It may be risky..but maybe another Beek would be willing to provide you with brood...Letting them just die is sad. Most beeks here in Maryland would and have helped me.
Hope you save them.
I will not let them die with out a fight I am working on something and if it work's I will post it here.
went out this morning to look at my bee's because I am going to work on them to try to get a queen in to my queenless hive. and then I seen a bunch of drone brood on the ground and on the landing ? Please tell me what you think I will check back at noon. :? :? :?
When a weak hive encounters a chilly evening where the cluster might be small enough to not be able to cover the entire brood nest, you might see corpses thrown out the next morning. It's possible that if they felt that they couldn't care for or didn't need the drone brood, you might see something like this. Just a tought.
I just went through introducing a new queen into a worker laying hive! The hive was a new package in April and swarmed in late June. It re-queened itself (at least I thought it did) and I found eggs. After watching it for three or fours weeks, I realized it was only producing drones with a very very messed up brood pattern. I checked out mulitple options and decided to try to re-queen. It took a while to find one from a fairly northern climate (I'm in Wisconsin and thought a California queen would have a tought time adjusting this late in the year). Anyway, I found a queen, put the corked cage in the hive, checked it daily and saw pretty heavy balling behavior the first few days. After about four days, the bees seemed to accept the queen and I pulled the cork and cored the candy. I checked everything out this past Sunday and I found the queen (I had this one marked) and plenty of new eggs (one to a cell). I'm going to switch my hives around this weekend to pull a better supply of forages into the weak hive.
For what it's worth!
Greg
I checked my hive yesterday and the queen was still there and I saw lots of eggs in the upper hive body. They only have two frames in the upper hive body so I am going to put the frames below and take off the top hive body. I think everything is going good except for I need more house and nursurey bees. Hopefully Ill get two frames of capped brood from a friend on Saturday.