If I had not seen it I would not have believed it. I was at JeffH’s place late yesterday afternoon and low and behold, a mated queen and attendants about 3 or 4 metres (roughly 12 feet) from her hive walking about. She appeared to be fine and Jeff worked out which hive she belonged to and placed her at the entrance where she was welcomed back inside.
To me that puts the story to rest that a queen stays in a hive unless it is to swarm. Has anyone else seen that?
Cheers
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Hi Peter, like I was saying, it makes you realize how easy hives can go queenless, then finish up with laying workers. That was all new to me also. Actually, she could have fell on the grass during an inspection two days earlier. She must be blessed because I could have stood on her while I was doing all of that mulching. Then I found her on that piece of wood. Then found the queenless colony. Then lost her again, only to find her again at the entrance of your colony.
She surely was a lucky B…
Same for me today at Tewantin during a check on two brood boxes I have up there. After checking all the frames and also seeing if I could spy the queen (I didn’t see her), I’d put all the frames and lid back on and I just happened to look about 6 ft away on a paver and there she was. I was shocked 
. I don’t know if I had thrown her over there with some wax or what. So put her up on top of the frames and she quickly disappeared back into the hive. That was a warning for me not to be so casual in pulling frames.
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When I reported this on the forum a while back (seeing a queen take flight during a routine inspection), I think it was @JeffH who indicated or thought it might be more likely with a young queen.
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Same thing happen to us a couple of months ago. Found a queen wandering around aimlessly on the ground a couple of hours after inspecting the brood boxes of our 3 hives.
We placed her at the hive entrance of where we thought she originated from and she appeared to be welcomed.
A couple of weeks later we found one of the other hives was queenless and were in the process of raising emergency queen cells. I assume our guess of where she belonged to was incorrect.
Is there any trick we could have used to determine which hive was queenless?
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I’ve had one fly off!
The standard advice is to stay put in case she has used you as a landmark but half an hour later I gave up.
She was back at the next inspection… phew!
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There is no way of knowing for sure which hive the queen has come from without knowing which hives have a queen. For that reason I prefer marking my queens.
It makes doing splits a lot easier in the Spring when swarming is likely to happen and easier to find when doing hive inspections if you want to have a positive sighting of the queen for some reason.
In your situation if the queens were all marked it would be a matter of placing the ‘wandering’ queen in a cage then checking the brood areas to know which hive didn’t have the queen then releasing the queen into the right hive.
I have one queen marked in my hives, the rest have thus far evaded me, they love playing ‘cat and mouse’. As you are on the Sunshine Coast if you like we could help each other out with an extra pair of eyes.
Regards
this spring I found a queen on the ground- at first I thought she was a drone- she was wondering about- and looked fine except she had no wings! I assume she was ejected and had her wings ripped off for good measure! I placed her on the entrance- at first a few bees seemed to be trying to feed her- then one of them marched up and with a mighty kick unceremoniously sent her off the entrance back down to the ground. A few weeks later they had a new monarch.
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Yes @Peter48, I take your point that if the queens were marked it would make finding them a lot easier.
In our inspections of the brood I don’t deliberately set out to find the queen, only evidence that she has been there recently, ie evidence of eggs or larvae. As a consequence I probably only see the queen on every 3rd inspection.
I have never marked my queens but are seriously thinking of doing so but with different colours for each hive. That way if I did find an queen out of place I would know where she belonged to straight away. Not the correct way of using the colours to distinguish the years but adapted to suit our smaller hive numbers.
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Most times you are looking for brood to confirm the queen is there and laying but being able to find her if re-queening or doing a split it is so much easier if she is marked.
I like your point about color coding the queens so you can know which hive she belongs to if you find a queen outside of the hives. I have seen this recently and heard of others having wandering queens so the ‘old adage’ that queens never leave a hive except to swarm is simply not true. I was with Jeff recently in his apiary with a queen outside the hive after it being disturbed as well as others.
Regards
Hi all. Resurrecting an old thread, but I saw a queen out of the hive this morning on my lemon tree! Although I’m a new beek, I’m 100% sure it was a queen - long abdomen without distinct striping, big dark spot on her “back”, short wings. She appeared ro be getting nectar or just water from the flowers, then flew off again. I recently had a very small swarm (baseball size) on our trampoline which I tried unsuccessfully to catch. Could it be the queen from this swarm who still haven’t found a home, or a replacement queen on her mating flight stopping for some refreshment? Wish I’d got a photo! Any thoughts?
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Hey Trish! Wow, I’d gaze at a picture of a lemon tree with or without a queen bee on it…my guess about your maverick monarch is that she was on a mating flight. Seems unlikely that one would be separated from a swarm, since sticking together is the whole point. It’s cool you got to catch this unusual glimpse!
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I’m inclined to agree with Eva that it may have been a queen on her mating flight and a ‘recent’ swarm and seeing the queen ‘this morning’ isn’t related. A queen will usually be found in a swarm and not ‘off on her own’ so for that reason I would be thinking a queen on her mating flight. A queen is normally fed by her attendant bees and not out of the hive on her own foraging. But I also wonder if it could have been a native bee foraging.
A photo would have been great, a video clip even better, but normally priceless moments like that happens when you don’t have a camera handy.
Cheers
Thanks for your replies, guys. I stalked that tree and the surrounding area for the next few days with my camera but didn’t see a repeat performance. I have a pond nearby that the bees love, so it’s nice just to sit out there and watch them do their thing.
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I have a hive that was new last spring.The hive has been doing great.0n last inspection their were several queen cells, I left them alone. In the last 6 days I have seen a queen outside of the hive, once on the landing board ,next time on the ground and then found her 6 feet away on a fence poast with attenance bees. I offer her stick and she climbed on and I returned her to the landing board and she went inside. Should I be worried? I’m a 1st time bee keeper.
Welcome to the forum George, it is a bit late now to be worrying as it is likely the hive has already swarmed at least once.
If you only wanted to have just one hive then the better option would have been to have terminated the old queen and leave just two queen cells in the hive for the strongest emerging queen to dominate and take over as the queen. That said there is a lot of advantages in having a second hive needing very little extra of your time. You then can balance out the hives by adding capped brood from the stronger hive to the weaker of add a frame of eggs should the queen die.
The natural instinct is that in the Spring time a colony will build up super strong if the conditions are good and the colony will swarm with about 1/2 the bees and the old queen to go looking for a new home. This can be prevented to a great extent by doing a split of the hive by taking the queen, some frames of brood and stores and beginning a new hive which you can sell leaving the queen cells to emerge. It is not only a good result for you but for the environment also.
Cheers
Could it be a drone that you spotted? Many new bee keepers including myself mistake the larger drone bee as a queen.
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No it is definitely a queen. Yesterday the bees were upset again and I finally found her in my garden about 6 feet from the hive again with her escort. This was the fourth time. I’ve have cat birds around that like to eat bees, so instead of putting her back in the hive I put in a nuc box with a frame of bees, brood and honey. Wait and see what happens!
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Really strange that a queen leaves the colony with just a few attendant bees, that is too small a number of bees to survive outside a hive so I have no better option than you have done putting them into a nuc box and see what happens. Maybe add a frame of brood once a week or two if the hive can do without it.
Looking forward to an update Charles
Cheers