Queen Issues!! Christin's Hive (March 11)

Today we inspected our hives to rearrange the frames and add a honey super to better give the bees more room during their population spring growth.  An overcrowded hive typically results in a swarm.  That means we could lose up to 60% of our bees and the remaining small population of bees that stay would not be enough to produce a surplus of honey this year for us to harvest.

My hive looked in great shape to date.  Plenty of food, queen laying plenty of eggs ina nice pattern and the hive was not over crowded.



Christin's hive has a few issues we need to address.

We saw 2 supercedure queen cells and several swarm cells.  Both are large cells that look like a peanut shell.  Supercedure cells are located in the center of a frame, swarm cells are located on the bottom of a frame.

Here is a picture of swarm cells:

Supercedure cells are made when the hive thinks the current queen is not producing as much as they would like.  This can be because her pheromones are weak, or she is just becoming older or sick and not doing well.  But something is prompting them to make a new queen for the hive

Swarm cells are queen cells that hang from the bottom of a frame.  These are created when the colony is overcrowded and they are prepping for a swarm.  Once queen will leave with 60% of the colony, one queen will stay in the hive.

We know the hive is not overcrowded, so are they truly swarm cells?  What may be happening is that the swarm cells are really emergency queen cells.  If the supercedure cells do not produce a queen, they have a backup plan with the others they created.


Yesterday we decided to cut out and remove these additional queen cells.  The reason we did is because in bee school they mentioned this practice several times to prevent or reduce the chance of swarming.  Well, after doing this and discussing with our mentor, this probably was not the best things to do.  All is not lost though and we can come out better in the end if we just re-queen in a week.

Our action plan:
We plan to go back in one week to check on things again.  If the current queen is not laying eggs, there is no way the worker bees can make a new queen because there will be no fresh larvae.  So we will buy a new mated queen that is actively laying, remove the old queen, and introduce the new queen. 

If the worker bees have already started making new supercedure cells, we have the option to let nature take its course, and they will raise a new queen on their own.  Keep in mind we will lose almost 3 weeks of no population buildup if they raise a queen on their own.  It takes approx. 27 days for a new queen to develop from an egg, hatch, mate and start laying eggs of her own.
There are issues with that as well.
The new queen will be a virgin queen that needs to leave the hive to mate with several drone bees.  Once she leaves the hive she is vulnerable to injury, getting lost, or eaten by birds.  If that happens we have no queen and will have to purchase a new one anyways. 

The other issue is that once she is in her mating flight the drones that mate with her may be from her own gene pool. Therefore creating an inbred queen.  This can result in offspring that are weak or more susceptible to disease.

I am currently leaning towards just re-queening in a week and moving on.  I have read and heard it is best practice to re-queen each year.  This ensures the best chance of always having a strong laying queen.