Find & Fix a Queenless Hive (Lazy Beekeeping)

In my opinion beekeepers fiddle with their hives too much and too often. I love bees, and I love seeing bees do bee stuff as much as the next keeper, but I’ve come to realize that our best intended inspections often do more harm than good.

Weekly checks looking for swarm cells or supersedure cells don’t automatically stop swarms or supersedures.

What they very often do is to rip apart and kill queen cells. Swarm cells typically are built on the bottom of fram, and hang down between the two boxes. Six or eight times out of ten the bees connect the tips of these cells to the top of the frames below them.

I’ve killed more queen cells than I care to count by tipping boxes to look for them.

The act of looking for them kills them. That seems paradoxical in a way, but I’ve found it to bear out more times than not.

In a similar vein, looking for queens to make sure the hive is queenright holds a risk of pinching, squishing, rolling, or otherwise damaging or killing your queen.

The risk / reward equation in my mind tips in the favor of LESS is MORE. Fewer inspections is better. Less disruption of the colony, less drone comb torn apart, less queen cells torn apart…all this is better for the hive in my opinion.

Queenright Checks

The end goal of checking queenright is one of two things:

1. Preserve the hive.
2. Preserve your combs, and what’s in them.

These are really the only two outcomes of queenright checks. Either you save a hive that is in a queenless situation, or you prevent it from becoming a pest infested nasty deadout.

Save the Hive! (Or NOT)

Queenless hives left to themselves for a while are full of old worker bees. Old bees are grumpy bees. Old grumpy worker bees are the least likely to accept a new queen.

Stick a new queen into a hive that’s been queenless a while, and it’s very likely they will reject her (and kill her).

There are ways to get queens accepted of course…

1. Leave them caged a while.
2. Insert a frame of eggs and brood to introduce the caged queen on.
3. Introduction cage – a large cage pressed into a frame giving the queen room to lay, but keeping the workers away from her.

All of these are more work than I want to tackle.

If I decide to save a queenless hive, I typically will just combine it with a stronger colony. This way if there is any argument as to who is in charge, I know the stronger hive will win.

Preserve Your Comb

In a queenless hive the population dwindles as bees age out and die. Eventually there is too much comb and too few bees, opening the opportunity for Small Hive Beetles and Wax Moths to wreck your combs and any pollen, bee bread, nectar, or honey in them.

I pick the words “YOUR Comb” carefully. My hives are rental houses that I own. The bees are renters who use the comb within the house, and they pay me rent in the form of honey once or twice a year. Unfortunately, bees can be pretty poor renters at times and try everything they can to skip out on the rent payment…but that’s another matter.

The key in finding queenless colonies is to catch them before the population dwindles to the point that pests move in and wreck the comb. Catch them in time and those resources can be given to another colony.

Easy Keeping – Queenless Colony

The easy way to find a queenless colony is to let the bees tell you they’re queenless.

Watch your entrances on a sunny warm day – mid to late afternoon preferably – and you should see lots of activity. Foragers will be zipping in and zipping out, looking like a stream of bees entering and exiting the hive. Very often you’ll see extra fuzzy bees clumsily flying in figure 8’s near the entrance. These are young bees on their first flights, orienting to the hive location.

This activity tells you something – brood is emerging and bees are foraging – the hive is normal, and normal is good.

If you DON’T see these things, if all the other hives are foraging heavily except for one hive, you’ve likely got a problem.

Dig into hives with dwindling populations and little entrance activity. They are likely queenless or have some other issue.

Fixing a Queenless Colony

My favorite way to fix a queenless colony is to not fix it. I normally shake the bees out, remove their hive, and give the boxes to other hives that can use them. Sometimes I’ll stick those boxes in a deep freezer to save for later. (Freezing kills beetle and moth eggs or larvae and preserves the comb).

The bees that were evicted will drift to nearby colonies and beg their way in. If a laying worker exists, she won’t be able to get into another colony and will die.

Problem solved with very little time and effort on the part of the beekeeper.

Easy Keeping is about acting when it makes sense to act, and having the discipline to NOT ACT otherwise.