The Queenless Hive

The Queenless hive

Has your hive lost its queen?

Generally you will be able to tell that something is out of balance in the hive if your bees suddenly seem agitated or upset while everything external around them has stayed normal. When you go through a hive that doesn’t have a queen, you’ll notice a lack of larvae and worker brood in the hive. If the queen died recently you may still see some capped worker brood that has yet to hatch out and no worker larvae at all.  As a hive progresses without a queen, you will start to see an excess amount of drone brood and an excess number drones in the hive.

The overpopulation of drones occurs when a hive has lost its queen because the queen creates a pheromone that suppresses the worker bees from being able to lay eggs. Without that pheromone, a worker bee will become able to lay eggs, but as she cannot mate she can only lay unfertilized eggs which become the drone bees. This becomes the last effort of a hive to spread their genetics before they eventually dwindle off. The remaining drones will mate with queens from around the area and thus the hive’s genetics will survive in other hives.  

Your options

When you find that your hive doesn’t have a queen, you have several options to help them get a new queen.

1) Find a swarm cell (peanut-shaped cells found on the edges of the brood comb) from another hive that has many filled swarm cells such that its removal wouldn’t jeopardize the health of that hive. This is the best way to go if a swarm cell is available because the queen will emerge from the capped cell in less than 3 days and go on her mating flight shortly after that creating a shorter lull in the amount of time that young worker brood is not being laid.

2) If an extra swarm cell isn’t available then another option is to transfer some worker bee brood larvae that is less than three days old from another hive into your queenless hive. This only works if the worker brood comb has larvae that is less than 3 days old. Putting this larvae into a queenless hive stimulates the hive into drawing out an “emergency queen” cell. They expand the cells of some of these larvae and continue to feed those larvae royal jelly.

All worker bees are fed royal jelly for the first 3 days of their life before getting fed a pollen mixture  called “bee bread” that the worker bees get for the rest of their life. A bee that continues to only get fed the nutrient rich royal jelly is what makes her reproductive organs develop making her able to mate and lay fertilized eggs therefore becoming a queen.

The hive will eventually replace this “emergency queen” with a “true queen” once the hive is doing well again because the “emergency queen” wasn’t laid with the intention to become a queen. She just served as a sort of steward to the throne until the new queen starts laying eggs. It takes 18 days for a queen to hatch out from an egg and then there will be more time she needs to go out and mate until she starts laying new worker larvae into a hive.

3) The very last option, if all else fails, is to buy a queen from a bee breeder. If you do decide to do this, be sure to find the most natural source available and buy an open-mated queen if possible. The main problem with buying a queen is that she will probably not be from your local area and thus will not necessarily have the genetic make-up to allow her to overwinter successfully. Your hive will also have a slightly harder time accepting the new queen because they didn't raise her out from her cell.

Similar to the above operation, bee breeding works by transplanting worker larvae less than three days old. The larvae are placed into queen “cups” (usually some sort of plastic) attached to the top row of a top bar. Some beekeepers will also artificially inseminate the queens with drones from the same hive to create a specific bee breed (buckfast, carnelian, etc.) which in addition to being unnatural creates a sort of hybrid bee that does not have the same genetic variations as queens that are able to open mate in the local drone congregations. The only thing preventing your bees from killing these bought “emergency queens” (because she isn't a bee from their hive) is the queen cage.

However, buying a queen may be your only option. Zia Queen in Santa Fe sells open pollinated queen bees.