Abbee
New Bee
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2013
- Messages
- 56
- Reaction score
- 5
- Location
- Shepperton - Surrey
- Hive Type
- National
- Number of Hives
- 8
Hi. On inspecting our 2 hives yesterday, we are really worried about one of them.
1. Very little uncapped brood,
2. a frame full of what looked like drone (capped).
3. 5 uncapped queen cells
4. 2 capped queen cells
and worse we couldn't find the queen. She's a new queen, less than 2 months old. We marked her last week. Could be we missed her but because of all the above points we think she's not there.
So many questions. Why? How? and what to do?
We've been unlucky with the queens that the old queen from that hive produced. Long story but about 1 and a half months ago we had 3 new queens from her, one replaced her in the hive which is now the missing one, and we kept the other 2 in a nuc each for insurance. But those 2 disappeared after they hatched. So we put a brood frame in one of them which then resulted in a QC but after more than 16 days it still hasn't hatched.
Could the old queen have produced failing queens? sorry if that's a stupid question.
We're waiting to see if one of the capped QCs is successful. If not we'll put a brood frame from the good hive.
How can we tell if a worker is laying the drones? and if so do we destroy them?
Any advice would be great.
1. Very little uncapped brood,
2. a frame full of what looked like drone (capped).
3. 5 uncapped queen cells
4. 2 capped queen cells
and worse we couldn't find the queen. She's a new queen, less than 2 months old. We marked her last week. Could be we missed her but because of all the above points we think she's not there.
So many questions. Why? How? and what to do?
We've been unlucky with the queens that the old queen from that hive produced. Long story but about 1 and a half months ago we had 3 new queens from her, one replaced her in the hive which is now the missing one, and we kept the other 2 in a nuc each for insurance. But those 2 disappeared after they hatched. So we put a brood frame in one of them which then resulted in a QC but after more than 16 days it still hasn't hatched.
Could the old queen have produced failing queens? sorry if that's a stupid question.
We're waiting to see if one of the capped QCs is successful. If not we'll put a brood frame from the good hive.
How can we tell if a worker is laying the drones? and if so do we destroy them?
Any advice would be great.