Hopelessly Queenless

A new beekeeper who I offered to help called me with an odd report - her bees which were in two hives are now all in one hive! What happens is that a new queen that came with the package didn't work out. Sometimes the queen is killed by a beekeeper who wasn't careful enough but most times this happens it is because the queen needed to mate before she could start laying eggs. To do this the queen must leave the hive a few times and if a storm comes up or a clever bird spots her that is the end of the hive. Since the hive doesn't have any eggs in it the workers have no way to produce a replacement queen. In this case the bees had a solution though - they just moved next door and went to work there!

In my case I installed a single package out at a friend's house. I try to avoid this whenever possible because a single hive is difficult to tend, when something goes wrong having a hive to pull spare parts off of is by far the easiest fix. The donating hive is able to regenerate whatever you take from it - even the queen herself. Knowing this was risky I had plans to either split this hive or move a second hive out there at the earliest opportunity. My gamble did not work out though.

Yesterday I checked on the hive to ensure the queen was establishing a good brood nest and I was greeted by something I hadn't seen first hand before - laying workers. Normally around 1 in 1,000 worker bees have fully formed ovaries and the ability to lay eggs. Since these bees never mated they can only produce male offspring though. This is because male bees are haploid - unfertilized. That genetic trick is also how queens are able to decide to lay a male or female egg. In a normal hive the workers don't allow other workers to lay eggs, only the queen lays eggs. In fact, the mere presence of young bees in a hive suppresses the laying worker bees.

In this hive the queen that I got most likely wasn't mated so her first job was to leave the hive and search for male bees to mate with. Either she didn't make it back to the hive or she wasn't able to mate at that location. I think a bird ate her while she was out. Regardless of the cause this hive was hopelessly queenless, meaning they didn't have a queen or a young female bee to raise as a queen. In that situation the hive takes drastic measures to try and preserve its genetics. As the workers get more and more desperate they search for a queen - any queen. In my friend's case all of the bees moved right next door. In my case some of the workers just disappeared from my perspective. Perhaps they found a feral hive nearby, best of luck to them.

With the queen gone and without any brood the workers who were able now started acting like queens. They started laying eggs. This both calms the hive down and makes it chaotic at the same time. As you can see in this picture workers aren't very good at laying eggs. A queen will check a cell to ensure it is empty before laying in it - workers usually don't do that. A queen will lay the egg in the center of the cell, all the way on the bottom. Workers rarely have fully developed ovaries so many of their eggs look twisted and very few will actually produce a viable bee. Also workers don't have a long enough abdomen to reach the bottom well and they lack the instinct to do it correctly so the eggs are often on the sides of the cell.

The worst news is that once a hive is this far gone you can no longer simply introduce a queen to put things back in order. Most beekeepers advise to combine the laying workers into a queenright hive and chalk the queenless hive up as a loss. Most of the workers will integrate into the other hive and that hive will enjoy a significant boost in its workforce, not a bad solution. Since I'm in this more for the fun of it than anything else I'm trying something riskier but much more interesting. First I picked the hive up and moved it into my back yard so I could give it more attention. I shook the bees down into a single box and removed the other two boxes and put them in the freezer. Those boxes were full of drone eggs which weren't going to do anything for us but take up valuable comb space. Tomorrow I'll put the boxes onto some of my strong hives and they will take out the dead brood and eggs that will no longer hatch, a much nicer cleanup job than I could do. And now for the trick, I took a spare part from one of my strong hives - a frame of eggs. If the bees do what I hope they will turn some of these young female bees into queens. One of the queens will eventually mate and return to the hive to begin creating more workers. Until then I'll keep the hive going by putting brood into it from the other hives in the yard. If the workers don't start to raise a queen I'll give them more eggs and a second chance. If they still don't raise a queen I'll shake them into the grass and take the hive apart.