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Faunsdale, AL | Old queen leaves with 1/2-ish of the workers leaving multiple queen cells to hatch and hopefully a strong queen emerges and kills the others in their cells before they emerge and they fight and potentially kill each other so there’s not any young virgin queen remaining.
Then the virgin queen must fly out and successfully mate before returning to the hive to begin laying to maintain the population of the colony. All this time the small hive beetles are likely to take advantage of the reduced population of workers in the hive and take over before the new queen’s offspring can build up.
Anywhere in this whole process, something can happen to the new Queen. If the colony has no laying Queen and no freshly laid brood to make an emergency queen from, it is dead at that point unless the bee keeper figures out what’s happened and takes steps to supply a Queen.
This can be by putting in a brood frame from another hive so the workers can make an emergency Queen cell (which they’re pretty good at doing) or kills the queen that’s not laying if he can find her and supplies a queen cell or even a mated queen into the hive.
Once the workers of even a strong colony have been Queen less for a while they typically become defensive and irritable and are almost impossible to save by introducing a queen or even fresh laid brood from another hive. At that point, most keepers recommend just shaking all the bees off the fames on the ground and taking the frames and hive boxes away before the wax moths and small hive beetles take over and mess all the equipment up.
Only other tactic, before the colony is mostly drones is to combine the Queen less hive with another strong hive and come back later and remove supers and reduce the size of the hive to prepare for winter. | |
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The bees all died
