Mystery queen and abandoned brood. Help please! 🙏

[JCB]

Hello

Last winter our single colony of bees died, so I decided that we wouldn't get any more bees this year. However when I went to bring the hive in to clean and store I noticed activity - a new swarm had turned up complete with a marked queen!

I returned to the hive two weeks later to discover that the bees had apparently swarmed again - at least the queen was nowhere to be seen, there were no eggs and no brood. The strange thing is that there were also no queen cups to be seen. Since there were still lots of bees present in the hive I decided to order a new queen.

Nearly two weeks later the queen arrived. I opened the hive to do a quick inspection before putting her in and, lo and behold, there were eggs, brood and capped brood - loads of it! Then I spotted the queen (who wasn't marked. Still scratching my head as there were no queen cups to be seen).

I decided to dust off another hive, take some frames of capped brood from the other hive as instructed in the textbooks and set the queen cage in the middle of the frames.

I returned to the new hive today (three days later) and the hive had been abandoned. Couldn't see any evidence of the queen (dead or alive); there were two dead bees still in the cage, and a handful of bees (presumably from the other hive) checking the place out, perhaps.

So three things:
1. Any ideas regarding the mystery of the queen-cup-less queen?
2. What may have happened in the second hive? and, more importantly,
3. Should I put the capped brood frames back in the busy hive or will it cause problems (there's also uncapped brood on those frames, presumably dead?)?

I'd be really grateful of any pointers.
Thank you

 

[GuyNir]

1. You missed a cell/s.
2. Possibly 2nd (smaller hive) was robbed?
3. Put back in case some are still viable.

 

[JCB]

Thank you ��. I'll put the brood frames back today.

 

[pargyle]

Other possibilities ..

1. The time frames you indicate don't hang together .. they could only have made another queen from eggs .. so they would have to have made a fresh queen which got mated and started laying in very short order (almost impossible ?) ... if you then had loads of capped brood when you next inspected ?

2. Had the marking worn off the marked queen ?

3. The original swarm could have had a virgin in it as well as the marked queen - not unheard of. Once she proved viable the old marked queen would be dumped (unlikely they would swarm again on the marked queen.)

4. The bees you transferred to go with your new queen were mainly foragers and not nurse bees - capped brood will not anchor nurse bees either. So the bees you transferred (if the second hive was close to your original) went back to where they came from.

5. If the 'new hive' was a full size hive and you didn't dummy it down they would have had a lot of space to maintain and bees don't really respond well to this - would also encourage them to abscond back to a more bee friendly environment - ie: next door.

6. Did you give the 'new hive' some stores as well as frames of brood ?

 

[robmort]

For your 2nd hive, you would've had more chance if you had removed the workers from the Q cage when introducing it, as is the standard procedure.

 

[beeno]

1. No eggs, larvae or particularly sealed brood - you are either -Q or there is a virgin in there. Should have done a test frame.
2. In making up the other hive you have to give them a good complement of nurse bees from the brood nest as all the foragers will go back to the original hive as well as giving them pollen and honey/nectar stores. If there were very few nurse bees left in the end, the colony was not viable, and they absconded as it was not their Q.

 

[GuyNir]

For your 2nd hive, you would've had more chance if you had removed the workers from the Q cage when introducing it, as is the standard procedure.

Don’t think this is standard procedure. Many say don’t bother. I’ve never removed the nurse bees.

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

For your 2nd hive, you would've had more chance if you had removed the workers from the Q cage when introducing it, as is the standard procedure.

I wouldn't call it 'standard' procedure, I've never done it and I know plenty of others who don't either.

 

[JCB]

Thank you for your replies.

I've gone back and checked the dates. I discovered the swarm with the marked queen on May 3rd. I made my next inspection actually nearly four weeks later on 30th May when I found the hive queenless. New queen arrived 9th June.

Maybe a Virgin queen had started laying already when I checked on 30th and I just didn't spot the eggs or the queen (there was definitely no larvae). I still haven't found a queen cup either (unless it's amongst a maze of comb that the bees have stuck to one side of the hive - though it mostly looks like honey stores). I don't think the marking had rubbed off the queen. If it had there presumably wouldn't have been a delay in the process and I would have seen larvae.

Anyway, I returned the capped brood to the original hive this morning. Hopefully all will be well.

Regarding the second hive I did everything the book told me to in terms of putting capped brood in and food (I put sugar syrup in a feeder on the crown board and two frames of honey from the other hive). Having read the suggestion of robbing and also another thread on the subject I suspect this was one of the causes of the absconding - I noticed this morning that I had not put the roof on straight and there were bees flying in and out of the gap left at the top.

I had thought that the bees on the frames of capped brood were nurse bees as there was some larvae in the frames as well. But by all accounts the environment was perhaps too large (it was a full size brood chamber) and overly accessible to robbers to be viable.

Thanks again for your thoughts and suggestions - much appreciated. There's so much to learn!

 

[Erichalfbee]

Just as an aside JCB
How did you ascertain the hive was queenless?

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

Thank you for your replies.

I've gone back and checked the dates. I discovered the swarm with the marked queen on May 3rd. I made my next inspection actually nearly four weeks later on 30th May when I found the hive queenless. New queen arrived 9th June.

Thought as much,
Queen had been superseded (happens often in a swarm with an old queen), by the time you got the new queen she was mated and laying.

Regarding the second hive I did everything the book told me to in terms of putting capped brood in and food (I put sugar syrup in a feeder on the crown board and two frames of honey from the other hive).

Exactly how much brood was on the two frames you put with the new caged queen? There can't have been much in there with a freshly mated queen.
Two frames of honey and a feeder is definitely overkill. My thoughts?
Too few bees put into the mix to start with, you should have used a nuc, stuffed the entrance with fresh grass, put in two good frames full of brood, preferably brood on the point of emerging, put in the caged queen with the candy protected then shake another couple of framefuls of bees in before closing up.
not enough brood to keep the nurse bees, so they absconded back to the home hive, hive was then robbed out - including the candy in the queen cage - new queen and entourage bought it.
Just learn from this and forge on, knowith you won't make the mistake again.
Out of interest, what book were you following?

 

[JCB]

The queen that was in the hive had a very obvious marking making her very easy to spot. When I looked the second time she was nowhere to be seen and also there was no brood present. There's a chance I may have missed noticing eggs though. On the third inspection I saw a queen and she was unmarked (and there were eggs and brood visible).

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

The queen that was in the hive had a very obvious marking making her very easy to spot. When I looked the second time she was nowhere to be seen and also there was no brood present. There's a chance I may have missed noticing eggs though. On the third inspection I saw a queen and she was unmarked (and there were eggs and brood visible).

exactly - imperfect supersedure (when daughter kills mother before getting mated.