New Bee "Haver" trying to get to Bee "Keeper" Needing Act of God to help colony

[LaCarolus]

Alright let me start by saying hello all.  Much like the title says I am a first year bee owner.  I have encountered a problem that I have not been able to resolve from reading other posts here so I will explain my issue and see if some of the experts here might be able to help me.  To start I live in Ohio and bought a 3# swarm with a Russian queen earlier this year.  The swarm was hived around the 20th of April in all new equipment, a 10 frame deep with a screened bottom board and on wired foundation.  Everything was going great into late June-  Bees had filled the lower deep and upper deep with brood/pollen/nectar/etc. On a side note the brood pattern on this marked and clipped queen seemed very good.  I added a super in late June/early July as i had bees "bearding" on the hive front at night.  Well this whole time during inspections I  had seen queen cells on the lower parts of the frames and thought this was normal for Russians...must have been wrong there.  Needless to say on July 21st i was showing my family the hive of gentle bees I had started this year when i noticed a very small ball of bees on the ground in front of my hive.  After donning my cumbersome gloves i picked through the pile to find my clipped and marked queen trying to swarm!  Well the next day i opened up the hive to find that they had built 15 queen cells at all heights on the frames and i was unable to find my marked queen.  I left 2 queen cells in the hive and called my supplier.  He said to remove the two cells and requeen-and i tired to the next day only to have BOTH queens hatch while we were inspecting to remove them!  Not knowing what to do i left both in the hive to let nature take its course.  Decided to wait a few weeks to inspect again and see which queen made it.  Well I missed my 3rd week inspection and that pushed me into late August.  The first August inspection showed ZERO signs of queen activity.  NO capped brood, no developing brood, no eggs, no queen, no space-the two deeps and three supers were almost %100 honey/pollen.  The lower deep had some empty cells with nothing (no eggs even) in remember 25 or so of these empty cells in all of the lower deep.  Both lower deeps had pollen and honey in them.  The supers contained almost all honey.  My normally none aggressive colony has gotten "killer bee" like in the last two inspection that i have done.  They sting very readily at gloves and other clothing.  It has gotten as bad as having 20-30 of them follow my wife and I as far as 300+ feet from the hive.  I have ordered a new queen from rossmans and she will be here later this week.  I have removed 3 frames of honey to be extracted and replaced in the hive empty with the new queen when we introduce her.  I have added another honey super hoping to let them draw it out and give the honeybound deep a place to move its honey to.  On a side note-one of my supers is a Ross round with a honey excluder below it (I know that was a bad choice now-the super and the excluder the first year)-its on top.  The next two supers are full of honey and the final super is just frames and foundation.  Another side note is that i have all plastic frames in my supers and have used 9 frame spacer in them also.  The bees seem to be OK with the plastic.  I guess my question is...Is there anything else anyone can think of to help this queenless/honeybound colony survive?  One last note- I started one colony and do not have the luxury of using brood from another colony.  Also since i have found NO eggs anywhere i am pretty sure i don't have a laying worker ....yet.    Please bounce me some ideas-sclod me for things I've messed up, and most importantly please try to help educate me about whats happened.  Any and all help appreciated! 

[qa33010]

   My guess would be they are queenless and as such are hacked off.  When did the queens hatch?  Do you have any empty frames for the deeps or supers?  Good idea about the super frames to give her something to work with when you introduce her.  If you can extract some of the deep frames that will give her a little more space.  If you want to wait and see if they calm down when you introduce the new queen then hold off extracting the deep frames until then.  Is there any room at all in the deeps?  If not you may have a queen that can't lay and blocked by an excluder so they will not draw out the frames above the excluder. 
     Do they have a ROAR when you get to them?  If they do listen to them when you introduce the new queen and see if it doesn't drop to a 'happier' tone.  Once you hear the change you'll never forget it.  Are there any beekeepers or associations where you are?  If so they may be a source you can use also.  As long as you have not gotten a laying worker and no queen the introduction should be okay.  One of my friends had a problem with a hive that killed every queen that was introduced (now they were mean).  After about half a dozen tries a queen cell was recommended by a wiser head and them buggers calmed right down.


    Shoot!  No need to scold.  If I was scolded every time I messed up I'ld have a constant drone (no pun intended) in my ear.

   Hope this helped at least a little.

[mtman1849]

I don't know how true it is but I have been told that russian queens take breaks in there laying cycles sometimes up to 3 weeks this is part of the way they controll the mite problem or so I have heard this could be part of the reason why you are not seeing any eggs

[Brian D. Bray]

I don't know how true it is but I have been told that russian queens take breaks in there laying cycles sometimes up to 3 weeks this is part of the way they controll the mite problem or so I have heard this could be part of the reason why you are not seeing any eggs

Exactly, and they will also take breaks between flows and periods of dearth.  Most hives will take laying cycle breaks during a dearth to conserve resources to the point of eating the eggs and larvae.  Breaks in brood laying is a very good varroa control.

[mlewis48]

 I have some Russians and live in Ohio as well. I had somewhat the same experiance. I had 5 of them do the samething. Going gangbuster and stop with brood production but they started up and got with the game. They are a little different than Italians, Buckfast, or the Germans that I have. You have to stay two steps ahead of them all of the time. What part of Ohio do you live in?
                                                   Marc

[SgtMaj]

Correct me if I misunderstood, but I think you said there was a total of about 25 cells available in the entire hive for a queen to lay in?  That's not a lot of space... have you thought about possibly extracting the honey and just feeding them until next year to give them some space to lay in?  Extracting may not be fun with such a riled up hive, but it may have a secondary benefit of calming the bees a bit, since there won't be those resources there to guard (though it's not going to have nearly the effect that requeening will).