On yesterday’s inspection i found 2 queen cells in one of my hives and only one single frame of brood, mainly capped. The queen cells are in the middle of the brood patch, i suspect they are superseded cells. When i spotted the queen (Buckfast), she looked very thin and didnt move around a lot, quite lethargic. What is strange, is that she was born this year, 2025 and stopped laying all of a sudden. I was always careful in my weekly inspections and she looked/behaved normal every time. As i dont want them to raise their own queen and mate with drones in the area (local bees are very aggressive), I wonder if there is anything i can do to save this young queen before i either requeen or join the hive with another one using the newspaper method. I have been feeding them with 1:1 sugar syrup with HiveAlive and also a complete-diet patty (Apipasta Plus) for some time now as we are in the middle of summer with temps around 34oC and very dry conditions. The resources are limited but i did see several bees carrying pollen when i checked them yesterday. The hive started as a nuc in April and now is quite strong, 10 frames broodbox and a 9-frame medium super.
A local queen breeder advised to keep an eye on her and inspect the hive every 3 days. Knock down any new queen cells and keep feeding them. Do you think it is possible to save my queen? Any ideas how to achieve this?
It appears to me that your bees have decided she’s a dud. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have tried to supersede her. Not all mated commercial queens are as good as they should be or she may have been damaged during an inspection.
Those remaining pupae will be your nurse bees when they emerge, so you need to ensure they have work to do. I’d replace her ASAP. It’ll take three weeks to see new bees from when she starts laying and with over 1K per day dying of old age, that’ll be a population drop of at least 21K.
Thank you very much for the reply. I checked the hive today, I didnt find new queen cells or even cups and took a short video of the queen today but it is too big to upload here. The video is here: Dropbox
She is marked white cause that was the only colour i had available at the time.
Freezing the video, it looks like there are eggs in the cells but it could be just the reflection.
If you select HD quality and pause the video to zoom in, does it help? But im wondering, if there are indeed eggs, why would they raise 2 new queens? One of the cells was fully formed and capped (both in middle of the frame)
Oh, yes. Zoomed in is much better. Definitely eggs and larvae.
She may not have been performing to their satisfaction. There’s not much of a window of opportunity for them to make emergency queens(when Queen stops laying or only lays drones), so it’s preferable to make supercedure queens while she’s still laying fertilised eggs. There’s all sorts of reasons they might not be happy with her; low laying rate, not fertilising eggs in worker cells, queen pheromone not strong enough, some sort of injury… and so on. Without her laying plenty of workers (1000+ per day), their survival is at risk.
If they make more supercedure queens, I’d be inclined to replace her with a quality mated queen while you can still get them at this stage of the season. There might not be enough drones with which virgins can mate. You need local advice on that.