How Long Can a Honeybee Colony Live When a Queen Dies?

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The honeybee hive is a complex and intricate society, with each member playing a vital role in its survival. At the heart of this society lies the queen bee, the sole female capable of reproduction. Her presence is essential for the colony’s continued existence, as she lays the eggs that will give rise to the next generation of bees.

When a queen bee dies, the hive enters a state of turmoil. The queen’s pheromones, which regulate the colony’s behavior, begin to fade, and the worker bees become agitated and confused. This disruption can have a devastating impact on the hive’s ability to function effectively.

In response to the queen’s demise, the worker bees initiate the emergency queen rearing process. They select a few worker bee larvae, typically between five and eight days old, and begin feeding them royal jelly, a special nutrient-rich food that is typically reserved for the queen. This special diet stimulates the larvae’s development and transforms them into potential queens.

The worker bees construct special queen cells, which are elongated and hang vertically from the honeycomb. Each potential queen develops within her own queen cell. Once the queens reach maturity, they emerge from their cells and engage in a series of “virgin flights” to mate with male drones.

The success of the emergency queen rearing process is crucial for the hive’s survival. If the new queen fails to mate or if she is killed by the other queens, the colony will eventually die out. This is because worker bees are sterile and cannot lay fertilized eggs, which are necessary for the production of female worker bees.

In some cases, the emergency queen rearing process may fail, and the colony may become queenless. In these situations, beekeeper intervention may be necessary to save the hive. Beekeepers can introduce a new mated queen from a reputable source, such as Wildflower Meadows, or they can combine the queenless colony with another colony that already has a queen.

Without a queen, the colony’s population will gradually decline as older bees die off and there are no new replacements. The colony may also become more susceptible to diseases and pests. In some cases, the worker bees may start to lay their own unfertilized eggs, which will only produce male drones. This will further hasten the colony’s demise.  Usually a colony can survive no longer than a few months without a queen.

The loss of a queen bee is a critical event for a honeybee hive. If the hive is able to successfully rear a new queen, it can survive and continue to thrive. However, if the queen rearing process fails or if the colony remains queenless for too long, the hive will eventually perish. Beekeeper intervention can play a vital role in helping queenless colonies survive, but ultimately, the fate of a hive without a queen is a delicate balance between chance and intervention.

How to Hold and Mark a Queen Honeybee

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At Wildflower Meadows, we regularly need to hold and handle the queens we are raising. For example, queens must be caught and put into their traveling cages. In addition, they need to be held for marking, and sometimes, they need to be placed above or below a queen excluder for various reasons.

Beekeepers, especially new beekeepers, often wonder how to do this without damaging the queen or getting stung.

Handling a queen requires a bit of dexterity and concentration underneath abundant care and compassion for the queen herself. The beekeeper must always be careful. From a queen honeybee’s perspective, we beekeepers are clumsy giants that can injure fragile body parts with the slightest erroneous move. The queen honeybee is a small and delicate creature—and we should never forget that.

A queen honeybee has three main parts to her body: the head, thorax, and abdomen. If a queen is to be handled, the beekeeper must know that the most robust part of her body is her thorax, which is the hard, dark area that separates her head from her abdomen. On the other hand, the most sensitive parts of the queen are her head and her long, delicate abdomen. A queen bee’s abdomen is soft, fragile, and filled with all the queen’s vital reproductive parts. When a beekeeper mishandles a queen, it is most often because they apply pressure on the abdomen. This must be avoided. The best place, by far, to hold a queen is by her thorax.

Surprisingly, a queen’s wings are sturdy. Holding her by her wings is the next best way to grasp a queen. A skilled beekeeper can safely pick up a queen by grasping her two wings together without putting pressure on any other body part. This is typically how our beekeepers here at Wildflower Meadows handle queens for marking, as it leaves the thorax exposed for the mark.

If a queen bee is picked up by the wings, she may start to squirm. However, if she is given a soft and comfortable surface to place her legs on, she will hold her body still and relax. When marking a queen, we typically grasp the two wings, then encourage the queen bee to rest her legs either on one of our other fingers (usually the ring finger) or on our thigh. Once her feet are grabbing onto something, her demeanor becomes relaxed. It is then easy to mark her thorax.

For beekeepers who want to handle their queen bees for marking, a trick of the trade is to learn to pick up a queen with one’s nondominant hand (the left hand for a right-hander). This frees the writing hand to draw the mark with greater dexterity and control. Once the queen is marked, placing her into a cage is relatively straightforward by guiding the top half of her body into the hole of the cage. If over half of her body is already through the hole, she almost always naturally follows through and enters on her own when released.

Queen honeybees are exceptionally gentle and non-aggressive with beekeepers. For all intents and purposes, they don’t seem to ever want to sting people. Even though a queen bee has a stinger, which she doesn’t hesitate to use against other queen bees, the likelihood of her stinging a beekeeper is almost zero. We have beekeepers here at Wildflower Meadows who have handled tens of thousands of queens and have not ever been stung a single time by a queen honeybee!

Queenlessness

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For most of its life, a honeybee colony has an active and well-accepted queen bee, which the colony rallies around. The queen herself, with her unique pheromone signature, is a key component of binding a colony together.

There are times, however, when a colony finds itself without a queen bee. This is known as queenlessness.

A honeybee colony can lose a queen for several reasons. Like any living creature, a queen honeybee is vulnerable to sickness, injury, old age, etc. But queen honeybees, being insects, are also vulnerable to the peculiarities of the insect world. Sometimes a colony intentionally kills its queen due to a disruption in pheromone signatures or some other environmental stress. Sometimes another virgin queen will appear—perhaps the colony raised another queen bee. An eventual fight to the death is almost guaranteed if a virgin queen emerges.

From both the beehive’s and beekeeper’s perspectives, queenlessness is precarious. The colony’s days are numbered if it cannot get a queen going. Time is of the essence. The longer a colony remains queenless, the greater its odds of perishing become.

When a colony suddenly goes queenless, it has only four or five days to raise a new queen. A queenless colony needs young worker bee larvae to raise a new queen. Once a queen is lost, there remains only a four- or five-day period in which young worker larvae will be present in the hive. After this period, all the larvae will be too mature for queen-raising.

A honeybee colony detects queenlessness when the queen’s pheromone disappears. This happens amazingly quickly. It usually takes a colony only about four to five hours to discover that no pheromone is being shared and that the colony is now without a queen. This is when the colony begins an agitated buzzing sound known as a queenless roar. Likely, this roar is an additional and urgent signal that queen-rearing must start, and it must begin immediately.

An experienced beekeeper can use this telltale roar (or its absence) as an essential tool when conducting a hive inspection. Another telltale sign of queenlessness is the disorganization of the bees. The bees have little to rally around in a colony with no queen and, eventually, no larvae. The colony has no larvae to feed, so the nurse bees wander around aimlessly.

As part of any bee inspection, a beekeeper should always be on the lookout for queenlessness and its telltale signs. Here at Wildflower Meadows, our beekeepers know that anytime a colony is roaring, or the bees appear disorganized, a further inspection is in order.

How to Find the Queen Bee

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Do you struggle with finding a queen bee?  Don’t be too hard on yourself.  Even here at Wildflower Meadows—with all our experience and years of beekeeping—we occasionally find ourselves scratching our heads, wondering why such a simple task can sometimes be so challenging.

Before you set out on your search, make sure you even need to find the queen. As a beekeeper, unless you are working for Wildflower Meadows or raising queens, you don’t have to look for a queen that often. The main reason for having to locate a queen is when you wish to requeen. In that case, you have no choice but to find the old queen to remove her.

Another possible reason to find a queen is when you want to divide a colony or transfer frames of bees from one colony to another. Surprisingly, even when dividing colonies and transferring frames, you don’t always have to find the queen. So, for example, look at this video, and you will discover a straightforward way of dividing a colony without even having to look for the queen.

Patience, persistence, focus, and relaxation are the key to finding a queen bee. When searching for a queen, the first tip we suggest is to be patient with yourself. Finding a queen is a skill that a beekeeper develops over time.

A helpful strategy is to play the odds. The queen will most likely be near the center of the brood nest, particularly on frames with open cells for her to lay in. That’s her preferred area because, after all, she’s the one laying the brood. However, always keep in mind that queens do move around. Sometimes you will be surprised to discover your queen bee in the strangest place – on the lid, walking on the honey, or cruising around inside the box. She can wander anywhere. However, more often than not, odds are she’s hard at work laying eggs in the general brood area. Why not start there?

Nevertheless, before diving into this promising brood area, it’s best to remove and inspect a frame or two at the ends of the hive. Start with a quick check of the end frames (not to mention the lid) and set those aside. Why? By doing this, you will free up some working space and gain space to comfortably separate the remaining frames in the hive. Now you can focus on the high-probability areas.

You want to relax your vision. A soft and relaxed vision will enable you to spot something that looks just a little different. Also, remember that sometimes, your eyes will pick up the unusual pattern of the queen’s retinue, which will naturally direct you to the right spot. If you’re a beginner, after checking each side of a frame, pause, take a quick break, then give both sides of the frame a second look. This saves time in the long run because missing a queen right in front of you will waste time when you fruitlessly look through all the remaining frames.

Keep a routine going. Have a systematic approach to each frame, so you don’t overlook areas. For example, you can begin at the top of the frame, scanning down the frame from left to right. Or you can start at the left of the frame and scan up and down across the frame. Just be thorough and consistent.

Be mindful of the conditions around you. This is crucial since you will hold the frames outside the hive for some time. If there is robbing in the apiary, use a robbing cloth. If the weather is chilly, you must work relatively quickly to keep the brood from chilling. If conditions are sunny, be mindful of keeping the frames exposed to direct sunlight for too long, as prolonged sunlight can dry out the larva and damage the brood. Also, queen bees tend to avoid the sun, so holding a frame up to the sunlight can encourage a queen to run to the other side of the frame, and you can miss her altogether.

Understand that there will be times when you just can’t find the queen bee and strike out. This is normal and happens even to experienced beekeepers. We would advise that you probably don’t want to disturb the colony after two rounds of searching. It is best to call it quits, put everything back together, and come back another time.

What Is a Drone Laying Queen?

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Sometimes you may inspect a hive and be caught off guard by an excess of drone brood. Why is your queen laying so many drones? If you’ve stumbled on a drone-laying queen, you need to be concerned. Drones are very important to a hive and play a vital role. However, finding several layers of drone brood in your hive is neither normal nor healthy for a colony.

A healthy queen will lay a relatively small percentage of (male) drone honeybees. This happens mostly during the spring and swarm seasons—but, as a rule, not year-round.

Drone brood is unfertilized brood. Queen bees lay both fertilized eggs (female) and unfertilized eggs (male). In order for eggs to develop into regular female worker bees, they must be fertilized with sperm. When eggs are left unfertilized, they develop into drones (male). This balancing act should be a controlled and well-planned process to ensure that drones do not overrun the hive. After all, drones do not produce honey nor defend the hive.

It’s not difficult to tell if there’s a drone-laying queen in one of your hives. When a drone layer is present, all the eggs will be left unfertilized, creating far more drone brood than normal. The difference between worker brood and drone brood is easy to observe. Drone brood appears bumpy and lumpy, whereas female worker brood appears flat. This bumpy, dome-like appearance takes shape as large male drone bees grow and extend past the cell. A hive with too many drones is a liability. Beehives need a balance of worker and drone honeybees to be successful and thrive. Worker bees keep the colony running and sustainable, and drones do not.

Drone-laying queens are often caused by one of two reasons: either the queen has been poorly mated, or the old queen has run out of sperm. The core cause in both cases is that the queen’s eggs are not being fertilized.

At Wildflower Meadows, we have a responsibility to ensure the queens we sell are never poorly mated, reducing the likelihood of drone layers. We work to prevent this by allowing an extra week of testing before any queen is selected for sale. By giving the queens this additional time to prove themselves, we can assess the quality of brood laying, identifying any drone layers in the process.

Luckily, remedying a drone-laying queen is not difficult—although it’s not a happy ending for the queen. Even if the queen is young, there’s no chance she will successfully mate again in the future, meaning she must be removed immediately. Requeening the hive may give the bees a second chance, provided there are enough workers left in the colony to justify investing in a new queen.

If the colony is too small or weak, you may have a lost cause. You may just need to fold up the hive, merge the bees and brood into an existing healthy hive, and restart a new colony from scratch. Sometimes a hive as a whole can’t be saved, but the bees themselves can be salvaged.

Why Do Bees Produce So Many Drones?

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Drone bees often get a bad rap—they don’t produce honey, don’t defend the hive, and they consume vital resources. So then why do queen bees produce so many of them? The answer, put simply, is that there must be enough drone bees available at any given time in order to sustain the reproduction of bees and the viability of the species overall.

All queen honeybees must mate with drone honeybees. This mating never takes place inside the hive but rather takes place outside the hive while in flight. Several days after hatching, a queen bee will leave the hive for her first mating flight. Queens will only mate during a brief period of their lives; however, they mate with up to ten to twenty drones at a time, collecting and storing their sperm. By the end of her mating flight, a queen may have up to one hundred million sperm stored within her that she’s able to utilize for egg fertilization throughout the next several years of her life. Collecting sperm from multiple sources allows the queen’s offspring to be genetically diverse. This genetic diversity improves the overall health of the colony, furthering a colony’s ability to fight off disease.

The queen bee mating ritual happens at “drone congregation areas” where the queen is greeted by hordes of drone bees. Drones leave their respective hives—sometimes venturing miles away from their colonies—in hopes of being one of the few lucky suitors. Unfortunately, the process of successfully mating often results in the drone’s death as its endophallus is ripped off, leaving its abdomen open.

While many drones are lost due to successful mating, realistically, drones only have a 1 in 1,000 chance of mating with a queen—meaning that many drones don’t actually die from mating at all.

In addition to the loss of drones that meet their ultimate demise through mating, many drones are lost from other causes. The flight to drone congregation areas can sometimes prove to be a difficult feat, resulting in drone loss due to natural and environmental reasons. These losses are normal and need to be made up by excess drone production in the individual colonies that surround the drone congregation areas.

Spring Requeening

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Although there are advantages to requeening a colony in the summer or fall, traditionally, beekeepers requeen colonies in the spring. One of the best reasons to requeen early in the season is to prevent swarming. Spring requeening reduces a colony’s tendency to swarm because, generally, colonies with very young queens tend to settle in with their new queen. It is older queens that are more likely to swarm. Why? Perhaps the new and young queen’s powerful pheromones signal the colony to keep her in place. Also, the requeening can distract a colony from swarming—at least while the new queen is being accepted.

A distinct advantage of installing a new queen in the spring is that a young queen brings enthusiastic and youthful energy into the hive at the very start of the season. This recipe for vigorous egg-laying leads to large population growth before the honey flows down the road. It’s perfect timing. This also means that the colony’s population should stay considerably large heading into the later part of the year and winter.

Besides the bees themselves, beekeepers who requeen in the spring also gain some advantages from this timing. Early in the season, colony populations are generally smaller, making it easier to locate the old queen. Also, if a new honey flow is just starting, the bees will tend to be on their best behavior and not as apt to behave defensively. During a honey flow, adult bees get locked into foraging. A colony will put up with a lot of beekeeper activity during a honey flow. The bees are focused on foraging and colony growth and are less apt to sting.

However, there are a couple of downsides to requeening in the spring.  The first is that spring weather can be turbulent, meaning that rainy and cool weather can damper a beekeeper’s ability to work the bees. A preordered queen’s date may not match the ideal weather for opening and work with a colony. Summer weather, in general, is more stable.  Running into adverse weather can also actually affect queen acceptance. If a new queen is introduced right before a long spell of inclement weather, the bees could go hungry and agitated, hampering the acceptance of the new queen.

Another downside to spring requeening is the possibility of additional queens or queens-in-the-making in the hive during requeening.  Beekeepers who requeen in spring, like all beekeepers, should always be on the lookout for natural queen cells during the requeening process. These natural queen cells are more apt to be present during the spring than any other season and must be eliminated while requeening.  One or more new and feisty virgin queens emerging from one of these queen cells is the last thing that a beekeeper wants to see during requeening. No one wants a newly purchased and precious queen having to deal with a battle royale before she even gets started!

What Happens When a Queen Bee Dies?

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The queen bee is the heart of the hive and the life source of the colony. Without a queen bee, a colony cannot function.

A queen bee may meet her demise in various ways. Sometimes, death may come suddenly, perhaps from a beekeeping accident or an unexpected attack from other bees. Other times, a queen may live a long life and die of old age.

When a queen bee dies, the entire colony becomes aware of her absence within as little as four hours. The bees figure this out by the lack of the queen’s pheromone. In a healthy beehive with a queen, the bees constantly pass along a queen’s pheromone from one bee to another as the bees shuffle through the hive. This movement circulates the queen’s scent within the hive. The absence of this pheromone indicates to the rest of the hive that a queen is no longer present.

Once this realization takes place, the bees switch into emergency mode. The colony appears agitated, and the bees start buzzing loudly. This distinct buzzing is what some beekeepers call a queenless roar. This urgent realization of queenlessness triggers the raising of a new queen.

A healthy colony will attempt to replace a missing queen by initiating multiple queen cells. Producing a new queen begins when a few young larvae are chosen for special treatment and are fed a special diet of royal jelly throughout their development. It takes approximately 16 days after eggs are laid before any virgin queen bees hatch from these queen cells. Typically, the emerging virgin queens will fight each other, leaving only one alive to venture off to become mated and then mature to become a laying queen. This maturing process, which occurs after a successful mating, takes another 7 to 10 days.

This lengthy process requires the colony to continue without a queen. During this period, while the colony waits for the new queen to be established, it is especially vulnerable to becoming permanently queenless. If, for whatever reason, the colony’s virgin queen does not properly mate, or if the virgin queen gets killed somewhere along the way, the colony is sunk. The colony now has no more larvae to manufacture a new queen. Therefore, unless a beekeeper intervenes with a commercially raised queen, such as one purchased from Wildflower Meadows, the colony will eventually dwindle and die off.

How Long Can I Keep a Queen in its Cage?

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When you receive a queen bee, ideally, you want to be ready to install her as quickly as possible. Queen honeybees are not meant to live in cages over the long haul.

Sometimes, however, situations can prevent you from installing a queen immediately. Perhaps it’s challenging weather, an unanticipated work issue, family matters, or some other urgent situation that can prevent you from installing a queen upon arrival.

If this is the case, it’s good to know that with the proper care and handling, a queen bee can live in a cage with attendants for a week or even more with consideration. This is not ideal, however. The longer the queen remains in a cage outside of a colony, the longer she is exposed to the dangers of being outside of a colony of bees. She also potentially begins to lose her pheromone signature, impairing acceptance.

At Wildflower Meadows, we have generally found that queens that spend an extended period in queen cages can sometimes tend not to perform as well over the long haul. This could be due to several factors, such as:

  • The ability of just a few attendant bees in the cage to control the temperature and humidity is not close to that of a full beehive. Therefore, the queen bee is subject to broader and more potentially damaging temperature fluctuations when in a cage than inside a colony.
  • While acceptable, the quality of the candy in the cage is nowhere near as nutritious as the natural food in a colony.
  • Sometimes, the attendant bees can become stressed or die, limiting their ability to care for the queen.
  • There is no water in the cage, so the bees and queen can suffer from dehydration.
  • Other unknown stresses of being caged could affect the well-being of the queen and attendants in the cage.

So, what can be done to mitigate these potential problems?

First, if you can’t install your queen immediately, you want to store your queen at room temperature and in a relatively dark and calm place in your house. There should be no drafts or extended exposure to sunlight. You must also keep the queen away from household chemicals, especially pesticides.

Then, twice daily—in the morning and evening—give the cage a drop of clean water. You can apply the water to the cage with your fingertip so that some water drips in. The attendant bees will lap up the water. Don’t give any more water than this. This is not a case where more is better. Too much water can chill the bees or melt the candy, creating a mess and possibly stressing or even damaging the queen bee.

Keep an eye on the attendants. If more than one or two die, you may need to remove them and add new attendants to the cage. This is a tricky proposition and one you should avoid.

If you need to store the queens for more than a few days, the ideal way to hold queens is to establish a queen bank inside a strong, healthy colony. This is the tried-and-true way of storing and maintaining queens.

Again, your objective should always be to install and introduce a queen as soon as possible. The colony is her home, and laying eggs in a healthy colony is her calling and way of life!

 Honeybee Antennae

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Antennas are fascinating devices that receive signals from other places so that those signals can be converted into useful information. In our daily digital lives, we use antennas that pick up Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals in our electronic devices and computers. In addition, we use TV and radio antennas to receive signals that are converted into sound and pictures.

When considering antennae in living creatures, aliens and insects are the first things that come to mind. Insects are very alien looking and may have been the model for how we imagine aliens!

Antennae exist for insects to serve a central purpose—to sense the world. Just like how humans have five senses, antennae exist to help insects touch, smell, taste, and, in some cases, hear what’s going on in the world around them. Antennae can pick up outside stimuli like air motion, heat, and sound. They’re often referred to as “feelers.”

For honeybees, antennae are arguably one of the most important sensory organs on their bodies. Honeybees have antennae to help them navigate the world—to find and taste food, find mates, sense direction, and sense danger. For us, it would be like having our noses and ears on our fingertips. Through their antennae, honeybees are able to communicate with other bees in the colony and assess their environment, which is essential to their survival and well-being.

If we were to compare honeybee antennae to human anatomy, the antennae would be a combination of our hands, nose, tongue, and ears all in one! Although bees can’t hear as we do, their antennae are useful for picking up sound vibrations around them. Studies have proven that bees are able to detect sound despite not having the same ears as humans. Some scientists even go as far as to say that antennae provide a magical sensory system since antennae can detect things that humans often aren’t very distinctly aware of, such as electric fields, humidity, chemicals, gravity, temperature, and wind speed.

Just like the worker and drone bees, queen bees also have antennae to help them sense what’s going on in the world around them. Like other bees, the queen bee uses her antennae to communicate with other bees and receive input from the environment around her. Queens, in particular, need to know the status of each honeycomb cell since honeycomb cells are where she deposits her eggs. Beekeepers often can spot queen bees investigating honeycomb with her antennae, likely determining the availability of an individual cell to receive a fresh egg.