Seeking advice - suspect queenless hive after 1st spring inspection

Beekeeping - Basics
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Hey all,

I’m in Dianella (Perth metro) WA, and today (21/9/25) did our 1st inspection of the season as its the only warm weekend we’ve had since winter. We have a single hive, with a brood box and flow frames in the super. On opening it up, everything looked good, lots of bees in the hive, and they were all pretty chill; however, when inspecting the brood frames, we found there’s NO capped brood at all, just frames of honey. We also checked the flow frames in case the queen had made it through the excluder and laid up there, but it was also just honey.

There wasn’t significant signs of pests, a couple of wax moth larvae, which is normal, just no brood, and we didn’t spot a queen; however, she’s always been hard to see. We’ve had this hive for 2yrs now and had a good season last year.

We’re not sure what’s happened, but in retrospect, we remembered we did have a weird mass bee die off about a month ago when there were a lot of dead bees under the hive. We don’t know what caused it, possibly pesticide from somewhere (not us), but we couldn’t check the hive as daytime temps were still under 20C. In hindsight, I suspect this may have caused the queen to die, and the bees we have in the hive now are the last batch of hatched eggs.

I’ve just done a bunch of googling and have read about introducing a frame of brood in the hope that they’ll hatch and sustain the hive whilst they raise a new queen - assuming they will. Noting there were no queen cells in the hive today. Or, I could try and source a mated queen and introduce her through a candy-plugged cage; however, my quick search seems to indicate most WA bee suppliers are unable to provide NUCs or queens until Oct (a couple weeks away).

Really keen to hear people’s advice on what I can do or consider, as at this point I’m expecting our hive to dwindle and die out over the next couple of weeks.

Cheers Tony

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Hi Tony, I agree to add a frame of brood as soon as possible before laying workers start. See if you can access a frame full of brood in all stages (BIAS). Then consider another one in about 10 days, especially if no queen cells appear on the first one. Keep doing this until queen cells do appear. It’s the presence of laying workers that would initially prevent a colony from making emergency queens on the first one or two frames. That would also contribute to the colony rejecting any attempt to introduce a new queen.

Bear in mind that each frame full of brood will add up to 6,000 bees to the colony,

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thanks for the reply and advice Jeff. I’ll make some calls to try and source a brood frame

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For what it is worth, I totally agree with @JeffH’s suggestion. The only time I would introduce an expensive mated queen, would be if I knew exactly when the old one demised. Failing that, a frame of brood with eggs will be accepted, and will eventually be used to generate a queen, if you can spare enough frames over time. A hive of laying workers is very unkind to outside mated queens :cry:, but they accept brood and eggs readily.

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