Queenlessness - What is Happening?

[PhilK]

On the 16th of November we caught a swarm in our yard - we hived it, but didn't have quite enough frames and they built a lot of burr comb. We had to correct the problem which was carnage. That swarm later was found to be queenless (I assume the queen was lost in the rearrangement, but unsure if it was queen right when we hived it as we did not see the queen). A real shame as I think it was our best queen that swarmed.

We assume the swarm came from a certain hive, and when we checked it yesterday there was no evidence of brood or eggs or a queen. I assume that they raised a queen but she was lost on her maiden flight. Is this usually the reason the parent hive of a swarm becomes queenless?

We also received five nucs a couple of weeks ago, and inspected them yesterday for the first time since putting them into their hives. At that time every one of them had a queen visible or at least eggs. Yesterday we noticed one had no queen, no brood, no eggs. What could this have been from? It was only 3 frames of bees so unlikely to have swarmed.. could the queen have just randomly died?

[Michael Bush]

The queen could have died, they could have superseded her, or they could have swarmed.  Just give any suspect hive a frame of open brood and eggs and don't worry about it.  Odds are there is a virgin running around in there...

http://www.bushfarms.com/beespanacea.htm

[PhilK]

Yeah that's what I did - just curious to have a run of queenlessness like that, but the nuc was the one that confused me most. Anyway they all got a frame of eggs so all should be good!