Hey everyone, I was wondering if it is possible to start a completely new hive with just a queen and a couple of attendants? Really what I am asking is if you bought a mated queen from an online store and put her in a hive with the attendants she arrived with, would she survive and make a successful hive?
I apologize if this question has been asked before.
Can't happen. You need thousands of bees. Even if you put the queen and a hundred bees on drawn comb, they could not warm the brood and feed themselves.
The answer to your question is an emphatic "no".
My guess is you would need roughly eight hundred bees and a queen for a colony to exist as a colony well before winter, ensuring them ample time to build and store before going into winter, at least in my neck of the woods.
...JP
Completely IMPOSSIBLE.
When bees swarm the queen has thousands of bees with her to start a new hive.
So you need a queen and thousands of bees.
In the wild, I would agree with the consensus; no. However in a heated laboratory setting, it might be an interesting experiment. Mini mating nucs only require a few hundred bees to raise brood. If there is enough time in your climate for a mating nuc to build up before winter, you could end up with a viable hive if you started with a few hundred bees.
I have tried with a hundred or so bees and no matter how much I babied them they could never raise any brood. Six attendants is even more hopeless than that, even in a laboratory. A FEW hundred, yes.
Also depends on the set up, whether they are in a full size hive or a nuc. My experience has proven to me that without providing (feed/pollen) for a small colony, they usually can't build comb, forage, tend to brood and most importantly keep the queen adequately fed/healthy.
Just this past week I went into a young lady's hive (a full deep) with 3/4 of one frame of bees. She had ordered a new, marked queen two weeks prior.
The queen was (marked) shriveled and runny and flew right off the frame never to return. I believe she was not being tended to/fed properly and it was just a matter of time for that lil colony to wither to nothing at all.
I removed a colony this past Saturday night and shook them into her set up with a plump queen the following Sunday, so she would have a hive in that set up.
BTW, an extremely small swarm is one that contains roughly 1,500 bees.
...JP
It is impossible.
The first food any larvae needs is royal jelly. This is produced in very small quantities by younger bees from a gland. Without many many younger bees, this food can't be provided and the larvae will not survive.
Once the larvae get older then they can eat pollen/honey which conceivably could be provided in a lab setting.
My observation hive made it through the winter with less than a couple of hundred bees. They couldn't make it, but then again there were some SHB and moths in there.
On a side note: do paper wasp, yellow jackets etc start a nest with just a single queen? Does the queen paper wasp or yellow jacket build the nest, lay etc or does a worker overwinter in a bore and somehow join a queen? Or is the anatomy of the wasp etc. totally different?
Just curious :? :?
Yes, the anatomy and the social structure of yellow jackets, bumble bees and some other Hymenoptera can start a colony with nothing but a queen. Honey bees cannot. Nor do they need to as they can survive the winter as a group. The others that can start with just a queen, cannot survive the winter as a group.
Thanks
I knew honey bees could not. I knew the others yellow jackets etc. did not overwinter but started a colony from just a queen. Figured it had to be an anatomy thing.