Small Queen dead outside hive?

[Wvwzzz]

Hi All

This morning I noticed something a bit disturbing outside one of my hives. There were about 50 recently dead bees (some looked quite small and young) outside with the undertaker bees moving more out as I watched. Not all the bees there undertakers were hauling out seemed to be completely dead but they looked sick. Once the undertaker bees dumped them, they would roll on their backs kicking their legs in the air unable to fly. I suspected maybe they had found a poisoned food source as they were acting like cockroaches that had been sprayed by fly spray.

I picked up a few of the dead bees and found they had died with their proboscis out. Whilst picking them up I found a strange looking bee with a larger abdomen, she looked like a miniature queen. About the same size as a drone with the polished head that the Queens seem to have (I have only seen a queen bee twice on photos of my frames, never in real life, so I am a bit rusty at Queen identification).

Could the hive have had some sort of internal battle with a newly emerged Queen where multiple bees were stung rather than encountering poisoning? The hive has been producing a health amount of drones lately so maybe they were/are preparing to swarm. I didn't inspect them today as I didn't want to further disturb them if there were fighting a poisoning event.

I have attached a couple of photos, top bee is a standard worker, middle bee is the strange suspect Queen and the bottom is a drone. All found recently dead near the hive.

Thanks for the advice.

 

[Ian123]

Hi yes it looks like a worker, queen and a drone have you inspected have they swarmed. Numbers of dead bees outside are common even just old foragers returning not making the entrance and getting chilled. Look for the obvious before any thing sinister. So inspect and tell us what you find queen/eggs/larvae/sealed brood and with this weather check for stores. Ian

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

What's the stores situation like in the colony?

 

[Wvwzzz]

Ok so I decided to inspect the whole hive last week and again today, it is not looking too good.

I purchased this hive as one of three hives almost a month ago. I have only previously done minor inspections on this hive, I considered it to be one of the stronger hives. The hive consists of one deep brood box and one super (without a queen excluder).

I could not find any evidence of a queen in the hive, no eggs, no larvae only a few sparsely scattered cap brood cells and a lot of drone cells. There was a heap of drones, probably 25% of the bees are drones. There were a couple of peanut shapes that looked like cap queen cells but they could just have been messy honey comb. The bees were quite interested in attending to these cells. The food stores were fairly low. However, they still have fondant on from winter and there were a couple of frames that looked like they have stored fondant in them. Sadly, I did see a drone with a varroa mite between its wings so they will also need varroa treatment.

The bottom box was rather deserted, only frames with fondant or empty frames. They looked like they have once been used for brood. Some frames were going mouldy so I removed them and replaced with fresh frames. It looks like this hive is going to require a lot of attention and to be re-queened. It seems most queen breeders have waiting lists for queens on back order though.

It doesn’t look like they have swarmed, I still don’t know where the dead queen came from, perhaps they tried to create a new queen when they had viable brood then she died or was killed?

Cheers for the help!

 

[Ian123]

Ok well there’s a couple of qcells on 1 frame there but also plenty of drone brood, maybe some worker brood cells above but not many. The pics blur as soon as I enlarge so hard to see. I’d suspect it’s a dead virgin and another in the hive. I’d be inclined to condense to a suitable size hive as there’s so many drones. Maybe adding a frame of eggs larvae from another to see what they do. Ian

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

I could not find any evidence of a queen in the hive, no eggs, no larvae only a few sparsely scattered cap brood cells and a lot of drone cells. There was a heap of drones, probably 25% of the bees are drones. There were a couple of peanut shapes that looked like cap queen cells but they could just have been messy honey comb. The bees were quite interested in

Queen's dead and those are emergency QC's the drones remaining to emerge are the last of the brood she laid
The dead bees you found before died of starvation - probably struggled to reach the remaining stores

there were a couple of frames that looked like they have stored fondant in them. The bottom box was rather deserted, only frames with fondant

They liquefy fondant before storing it, so it looks just like stored syrup - or honey, what you have seen is just pollen that's gone mouldy. They had worked up to the top box during the winter chasing the stores. the bottom box has gone mouldy because of the lack of bees
Looks like your queen was struggling to repopulate the colony after the winter and just cacked it. Possible starvation has given the colony another big population hit.
To be honest, even if one of those EQC's makes good and mates I reckon they have a massive uphill struggle to become a viable colony

 

[Erichalfbee]

You could try to put them into a nuc and give them a frame of eggs but quite frankly I think they would make a poor show of rearing a new queen. I’d unite them with one of your others.

 

[Wvwzzz]

Quick update to this saga.

On the 19th of May I decided to put a frame of brood and nurse bees in from one of my other hives to give the 'queen less' hive one last chance to try and create their own queen. On some of the other frames I noticed there were a few sparse drone cells (now 4 weeks since I had purchased the hive so I was surprised to still see capped drone cells).

I put a feeder on the hive and they started taking in syrup well.
Over the next couple of weeks, I periodically inspected the hive but no queen cells had been made and the brood had mostly hatched out.

I found an ad for virgin queens and decided to order one, thought I had nothing to lose, the hive in this time had capped a little bit of honey and was taking in good amounts of pollen.

Two days before the queen arrived (10th June) I opened up the hive to work out how I was going to introduce the queen and low and behold, the hive was full of capped brood, eggs and larvae. .

The mail order queen is now in a nuc and has mated and the now queen right hive is doing well.
I would like to try and understand what happened, perhaps two queens emerged and one was killed (the one I found dead outside the hive). Could a virgin queen have been running around for 4 weeks before laying?

 

[Erichalfbee]

Quick update to this saga.

Could a virgin queen have been running around for 4 weeks before laying?

Yes, easily

 

[Bakerbee]

Last year I had a very similar experience, I waited and waited and to me they seemed doomed, Jenkins told me to be patient and give the virgin time and he was right, I couldn't believe how hopeless they had looked to how quickly they began to thrive.