Queen gone?

Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum

Help Support Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Baggyone

House Bee
Joined
Apr 15, 2009
Messages
490
Reaction score
0
Location
South Lincs, uk
Hive Type
14x12
Number of Hives
12
Opened my hive today. Not a single egg and only a few drone brood hatching. The brood frames look as if they have been polished as they are shiny at the bottom but not a single egg, larvae or brood. If she has gone then it was before my last look 3 weeks ago to the day as drone are 24 days to hatch. Loads of bees though which might give me some time. Am going to get a test frame at the weekend to test for queenlessness.

Swapped the two boxes over to see if she is hiding in there and just wants to get to the frames.

If the test is no queen do I leave them to produce one or search for a queen?

May I just say this "bugger"

Thanks

Chris
 
1/ Your bees might be properly queenless, and so you get queen cells on the test frame.

Or 2/ you might already have a virgin queen in there. If the bees do not make queen cells on the test frame, then expect there to be a virgin queen present.

However, do not expect any virgin queen to get mated this early in the season. Instead, expect to find eggs at some point, but they will of course be unfertilized eggs from a drone laying queen.
 
The cold snap may of put her off lay,I would check again during weekend.
 
Which is exactly what I'm going to do Admin. :cool:

If theres eggs/young larvae then I may not do the test frame. I'm having a email around to find replacement just in case though.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top