# Have I lost the queen?



## dudelt (Mar 18, 2013)

Welcome to the forum. The first question you will always get on this forum in cases like this is "Did you treat for mites?". It is possible that the queen has shut down for the winter but there are usually some eggs and sealed brood. My guess is that the hive is in the middle of collapsing from mite overload. You cannot tell if there are mites from looking at the bees scurrying about on the comb. If it were spring or summer, before considering another queen, you would need to do a thorough search for the queen. If you install a new queen and the old one is still there, the old queen or the workers will kill the new one. Unfortunately, this time of year queens are very hard to find and if you could find one, I would not recommend making the change. My best guess is that the hive will not make it through the winter and you should plan accordingly for next year.


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## grozzie2 (Jun 3, 2011)

If the bees are 'healthy', I'm curious how you made this determination.

a) What method was used to check the mite load ?
b) Did you test for and quantify nosema levels ?
c) Did you see any K-wing bees ?
d) Were any crawling on the ground ?

You make the comment about 'committed to natural beekeeping', in which case, you should probably just let nature take it's course, you may not have a choice, queens are hard to come by at this time of the year. Statistically, odds are that colony is already dead, just doesn't know it yet, but that's just based on historical statistics, there are always the outliers, some make it when they look dead, and some look great, but die off.


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## RayMarler (Jun 18, 2008)

In your location you should still have some brood. I'm a few hundreds of miles north of you in the valley and all my hives have 1-3 frames of brooding going on still. The lowest frames of brood are in hives that have higher varroa mite loads in them. High mite loads can affect the queen's laying this time of year. A healthy hive should still have some brooding going on, in your area in my opinion. My hives normally shut down all brooding, if they do, around middle to end of December, but even so, many still have at least a silver dollar sized circle of brood going even then. Also take into account that darker blacker bees tend to slow or shut down brooding before lighter colored bees, especially as it gets this later in the season. If you have darker Carniolan or Russian based genes in your colony, with no flows going on, then perhaps it's possible they have shut down brooding by now.


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## trishbookworm (Jun 25, 2016)

Are the bees flying during warm temps? Any forage to be had? If there hasn't been any for several weeks, and you weren't feeding sugar syrup nor pollen, then brood rearing would shut down. I'm in OH, and I don't know what to expect for your climate. 

No brood to be seen? If the queen was crushed, or they swarmed, they would have made a queen cell - well, several - to replace her. Check the bottoms of combs, and the newer brood combs. If you see a queen cell, then whether it is capped or torn open or has a carefully cut circle will show if the queen is about to emerge, was yanked out and killed by another queen, or released herself. 

It is not possible to tell if mites are at too high of a level from a visual inspection of the bees. By the time you see a mite on the back of a bee, it means the mites have already lodged into the hidden spots on the bee and there are extra mites looking for room. It's a lot of mites at that point. 

You can use a stickyboard to check for mites, if your ktbh has a screened bottom, or you can collect at least 100 bees (about 1/4 cup) and either do a powdered sugar roll or an alcohol wash. Without that info, you are flying blind. And if you prefer to not treat for mites, then 90% of your packages/nucs will die. It's been found by folks who purposely did not treat 100 or so hives to see what would happen. 

Even ferals can get overcome by mites; if you put them in a bee box and let their colony get big enough to make honey for you, they will be vulnerable. If you keep their brood nest small, and split or let them swarm every year, that is more like how they live. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0150362 Means not much honey.... but that's not necessarily a deal killer for happy beekeeping! 

Losing hives year after year is pretty disheartening, and everyone who is posting about the peril of mites is speaking from experience.  

Without frames, we can't shake bees into a bin then dump into a jar. It can still be done though - top bar style. To collect bees to check for mites, I get a deep plastic cup, and a canning funnel. I put this next to a comb and brush bees into the cup. I use an alcohol wash, so once they are in the cup, they stay in. . It should work for a sugar shake and a mason jar. Just be sure to check carefully for the queen before removing the comb from the hive. Oh, and I had to build a hive stand - super simple, a base of plywood, and 2 x 4s attached to make a stand to set bars on. But you can use a plastic bin just the right width to set a bar into as well. 

If you have more than 2-3% mites, then by the following August they may be so numerous that there is no saving the hive. There are people who manage mite numbers by splitting, and removing drone brood, but I use oxalic acid vaporization. It leaves no residue in the wax, which is important to me. It only works when the hive is broodless. It's dangerous (the vapor is damaging to human lungs without an N95 mask and to eyes without goggles), hard to get under the brood nest for top bar hives, and expensive to buy the gear at first. But it works to prevent mite numbers climbing to the danger zone. If you're interested in this, try to find a local beek who uses it...


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