Help - Queen Query!

Beekeeping - Basics
1

Hi Folks,

Seeking a bit of info to help me sleep a bit easier over the next few days.

I got my first 2 nucs in early March from a local beekeeper. Both nucs were over wintered and were supposed to be 2021 queens. I noticed in one nuc a blue marked queen which indicates a 2020 queen. The second nuc, the queen wasn’t marked and I noted substantially smaller so I just assumed 2021 queen.

I put both nucs into hives and the 2020 queen hive was much stronger. After a few weeks of ignoring feeds, they took in 3l last week and this week. They’ve built out 6 foundationless frames fully and I’m cycling out the old frames for foundationless over the course of the summer. I actually moved a frame of stores over the the 2021 queen hive last week and a frame of eggs/brood this week to help them along as they are much weaker.

2021 queen hive, just hasn’t got going at all. I noticed about 2 weeks ago, they hardly had any stores built up (despite me feeding the same as the other hive and good forage in the area) and they only occupied about 4 frames (no growth since I put them in the hive). When I opened up this week, they have built up stores and drawn out maybe half a foundationless frame. I saw brood at all stages and a small amount of eggs. I spotted 2 supersedure queen cells today in this hive (no doubt about it). The cells looked fairly new, weren’t occupied or capped. I squashed both down as I assumed that because I saw eggs, the queen must be in there. Now I’m thinking I should have left them as something obviously happened to the queen and the bees are creating a new one. There are plenty of eggs now as I added a frame of brood and eggs to this hive to try get them going. My question is, if the queen is indeed no more, will the bees make more queen cells this week or because I squashed down the two cells I saw, that’s it?

The other general question I had out of interest was, would the hive replace the queen solely because she wasn’t getting up and running? Also, if they are making a new queen, do they kill of the existing queen before they start the process?

Thanks very much!

2

Hi Mark, & welcome to the forum.

As long as the colony has worker eggs or worker brood up to 3 days old (as long as it hasn’t been fed bee bread), the bees can make a new (emergency) queen.

Bees build sepersedure queen cells as a matter of course & is nothing to worry about if they are empty. I don’t think the bees kill the old queen before superseding her, unless they move eggs around, which they would need to do if they killed the queen first. I have personal experience of 2 queens in one colony. I figured that the second queen was a supersedure queen. They are in separate hives now, & one queen is definitely more productive than the other.

3

You should check again for eggs, maybe your queen is small and not well mated. You can pinch her and let the workers make a new queen or you can get a new queen.

I don’t think they kill her but maybe force her out at some point after the new queen is emerged. But they do start supercedure in response to a weak queen.