imafan26
Mod
Posts: 13961
Joined: Tue Jan 01, 2013 8:32 am
Location: Hawaii, zone 12a 587 ft elev.

Queenless hive or post swarm no brood, what to do

We just inspected our 4 hives and we just did a small honey harvest. We could not harvest all of the super because of the crazy skinny queen that likes to lay brood in the top box and put honey below (like a wild queen).

One of the hives we were hoping to split. It had good brood pattern a couple of months ago, now has fewer bees and not much brood. We think the hive may have swarmed.

Another hive has been weak and had hive beetles we did treat it for but there is also very little and spotty brood.

Hive 1: Strong hive, this queen is so skinny that she does not stay in the brood box, and gets through the excluder. In fact she likes to put the brood in the top super.

Hive2: Just harvested honey super. HIve consists of two deeps. We had planned to split this hive but queens were not available. In March we had excellent brood pattern and lots of bees. we think this one swarmed recently and may be in the process of rebuilding. We won't know since they will have to raise their own queen so we won't know until next month if this one is going to survive.
Hive 3 : We found brood, drones and 1 queen cell.
Hive 4. Is a captured swarm from last year that came from hive 1. This hive is very weak. We just treated it with MAQ for hive beetles. We did not see the queen or much brood but there are more bees than the last time we saw it. If we gave this hive more brood frames from the strong hive, would it be enough to help them out? Hopefully they do still have a queen and just giving them more bees will help to strengthen the hive against beetles and robbers. If the queen is gone maybe they can requeen if we give them brood. What do you think?

We have a couple of deeps and we could try to do a walk away split with the strong hive in case the other doesn't make it.

tomc
Super Green Thumb
Posts: 2661
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2011 2:52 am
Location: SE-OH USA Zone 6-A

Get new queens.

imafan26
Mod
Posts: 13961
Joined: Tue Jan 01, 2013 8:32 am
Location: Hawaii, zone 12a 587 ft elev.

No queens were available. We will try again.

User avatar
jal_ut
Super Green Thumb
Posts: 7447
Joined: Sun Jan 18, 2009 10:20 pm
Location: Northern Utah Zone 5

I have not kept bees in Hawaii. Your problems there will be a bit different than what I get here in high Northern Utah Zone 5.
Your post was way back in June and now here it is December.
Any way, I am sure much of beekeeping remains the same. For next time you see these problems, I suggest:

Hive 1; Just take out the excluder and let her run. You can pull frames to harvest honey.

Hive 2: It is good to check the bees every 10 days during spring build up time. Just tilt the top box so you can see the bottom of the frames. The bees usually build the swarm cells along the bottoms of the frames in the top box. You can easily scrape them
off with the hive tool. Now add a queen excluder and super.

Hive 3: Sounds like it is doing well. One queen cell? Was it hanging from the center of the comb or along the bottom af a frame? Usually a queen cell hanging from the center of the comb is a supercedure cell. It means the colony wants a new queen and you can let it go. If along the bottom of a frame it is likely a swarm cell. Sounds like you have an active queen since you found brood. You can use the queen cell to requeen a colony with a failing queen or one with no queen.

Hive 4: I would medicate and feed it. You have already medicated. Feed some sugar water.

imafan26
Mod
Posts: 13961
Joined: Tue Jan 01, 2013 8:32 am
Location: Hawaii, zone 12a 587 ft elev.

Hi all
Thanks for the replies. James we ended up doing some of the things you suggested.
1. The hive with crazy queen produces a lot of bees and since excluders mean nothing to her, we had to decide to requeen or just remove the excluder (since it doesn't work on her anyway) and let the bees build. We can steal brood from her to help the other hives if they don't have enough bees. We did decide to put the brood box on top since she likes to brood in the top box and put the super below. Most of the honey is stored in the lower box and we are planning to harvest the honey frames in that box.

2. The hive we kept giving brood to, only made drones so there was probably only a laying worker and no queen but lots of honey. We took the hive away, let the other hives rob the honey frames and forced the remaining bees to beg their way into one of the other hives or die. It was a dying hive anyway being queenless. Our mentor said the bees would be loyal to the laying worker and since she would be nearly impossible to tell apart from the other workers, they would likely kill any queen we would try to introduce.

3. We were able to finally split two of the hives and the captured swarm hive died. We requeened after the split so each split has a new queen. Two of the other hives naturally requeened successfully.

4. We treated the hives for varoa mites with MAQs.

5. Hive beetles were swarming a couple of hives but their covers were leaking, so we bought some new covers and that has made it easier for the bees to defend the hive. Another hive has a lot of beetles in the super and most of the bees are in the brood box below. The bees look healthy and we found the queen. We just think that they have less brood because it is winter and there is less food so fewer bees are needed. We did see pollen on some of the bees so they are finding flowers. It has been so cold for us the oil in the traps were solid so we replaced the oil. We have to decide about taking the super off and freezing it to kill the beetles and giving the box back when there are more bees to defend it .

Our hives have forage year round so we don't need to feed them. They don't make as many bees and the workers live longer in winter because they are not being exhausted foraging. It is relatively warm for this time of year and we may end up with another early honey flow, next year.

We talked about maybe getting a swarm trap to make it easier to recapture swarms and we have a people who have asked for bees. We are only allowed to keep a certain number of hives in the garden, so we have made arrangements that if we have excess bees, they would be taken to the other facility which can accommodate a larger number of hives. If we lose any hives and need a replacement they will give us nucs.

Our bigger problem will be getting queens since the state is making it harder to get bees shipped in from off island. We get our queens from Kona Queens now. Our bees are Carniolan bees. They are very docile bees. In fact one of the hives we inspected did not even need to be smoked. That was a little disconcerting to us since while we don't want aggressive bees we do want them to be defensive. Defensive bees do a better job of keeping the hive beetles in control.

User avatar
jal_ut
Super Green Thumb
Posts: 7447
Joined: Sun Jan 18, 2009 10:20 pm
Location: Northern Utah Zone 5

"Our bigger problem will be getting queens since the state is making it harder to get bees shipped in from off island."

I was going to ask if you can get package bees in the Springtime? Here wintering bees is a tough proposition. Gets too cold. I have decided it is best for me to order packages in the spring and hive them is a single deep and push them for a box of honey. I use the 40 pound honey supers. Once I have that super of honey the bees have paid for themselves and made me some cash too. They can have the late bloom to get ready for winter. If they make it fine, if not I am not crying about it. Losing bees is part of the game. Yes we do lose bees, for a number of reasons. Swarming, disease, pests, robbers (ya, the human kind), winter cold...........

imafan26
Mod
Posts: 13961
Joined: Tue Jan 01, 2013 8:32 am
Location: Hawaii, zone 12a 587 ft elev.

Some good news on our last inspection.
The weak hive we had died it was slimed from varoa mites.

On the other hand, the 2 hives we had before that were struggling look much better with more bees

One hive is still weak. The hive requeened in January and it was having problems with chalk brood and mold. There is still some chalkbrood and there was mold on the cover, but the new queen finally is making more brood.

We are due for MAQ treatements but three of the remaining hives are building brood so we gave each of them a super on top of the brood box and added a couple of honey supers.

We did not want to treat the weak hive with MAQ so we treated with apivar instead. The chalkboard is still a problem but there are more bees and a screened bottom board was put in. We can't really do anything about the rain. We cleaned up the bottom board and scraped off the mold we could see and if the brood are not good cleaners we might have to requeen with a hygenic queen.

We did feed pollen and sugar water to one of the hives but it did not really need it.

It looks like we will get another early flow this year. We have 2 supers about 3/4 full of honey now.

User avatar
jal_ut
Super Green Thumb
Posts: 7447
Joined: Sun Jan 18, 2009 10:20 pm
Location: Northern Utah Zone 5

Quote: "It looks like we will get another early flow this year. We have 2 supers about 3/4 full of honey now."

Very nice. Best of luck.

imafan26
Mod
Posts: 13961
Joined: Tue Jan 01, 2013 8:32 am
Location: Hawaii, zone 12a 587 ft elev.

Thanks James
Pollinator month is in June and our group is hosting a pollinator theme for that Second Saturday event. I am planting seeds now of nectar and pollen plants and hopefully will get some in the garden in time for them to bloom by then and also have seedlings for sale. Hopefully I will get my signs up on the plants to show which plants, including veggies, fruits, and herbs that are dependent on pollinators. The beehives are secluded so not for the public to visit, but we also have manmade hives for carpenter and leaf cutter bees which are already in the gardens. Those bees are less territorial but a carpenter bee will get in your face once in a while but they are used to people near the hives. We should be able to harvest honey to sell and we will bring out the teaching and observation hive for demos.

We are also featuring the other pollinators like the birds, other bees besides the honey bees, wasps, flies, and beetles. In North America bats are pollinators but Hawaii only has one native bat and it is an insectivore and does not pollinate plants. We do have a native bee, a yellow faced bee but it is not a major pollinator and it is endangered. I am going to try to throw in some beneficial insects and of course we will be getting the message out to BEE friendly and avoid pesticides when the bees are around. If you must use pesticides remove all of the flowers and buds a couple of days before to stop bees from visiting and to use non-persistent pesticides only if you have to since predatory mites and thrips which are beneficial insects would still be killed.



Return to “Beekeeping”