Queens

I recently picked up some books on rearing queens. I wanted to know more about how queens are bread, separated, collected, and so on. I was convinced by authors Doolittle and Pellet of the importance of rearing queens in the role of a beekeeper. I went right to work with Ethyl, collecting a few frames and placing them in a nuc box. In no time, I had a frame full of queen cells.

About a week after I collected the frames from Ethyl, I was performing a routine inspection when I noticed Doris was not doing well at all. I could not locate her anywhere in the hive. There were no new eggs being laid. The youngest larvae I could find were about two days hatched.

I found this frame nearly completely empty. It had what looks like a poor attempt at queen replacement. The next frame was quickly running out of capped brood, too.

Back in the nuc hive, I was trying to isolate the queen cells to hopefully collect more than one queen. The workers were much better at digging them out, than I was at caging them. With this sudden queen disappearance, we had to act fast. I took the frame of queens and added them to the now queen-less hive.

 You can see scars in the comb where I had put queen isolating cages. The bees dug through the comb and dislodged the cages. I will write more about what I have learned later on when I have more to talk about.

Between both sides of the frame, there was a total of eleven queen cells. 48 hours later, the colony narrowed it down to just three. The workers not only discarded the queens, but virtually erased the cells. I wasn't sure what was going on. Could one of the cells have already hatched, mated and began laying eggs in that short amount of time? Oh yeah, I found brand new eggs when I rechecked two days after installing the frame of queen cells. Still, there is a clear age difference between the fresh eggs and the now week old larvae.

I checked the entire hive as thoroughly as possible, then went back and rechecked all the frames. I could not find any queens. I still have no idea who is in charge of this colony, or what I am doing wrong with the queen rearing. I will be going back to the books, but I did swap out another frame of brood from Ethyl to put in my queen box. Properly, there is already new cells started there. Ethyl is by far our best producing queen. It is astonishing to compare the two Italian queens that came from different breeders, and the the Carniolan. We definitely have three very different hives.