# dead queen



## thinkharder (Jun 13, 2008)

*not dead*

A half hour ago, I went to look inside the yellow plastic cup I placed the supposedly dead queen and found her moving feebly. 

Smoke inhalation? She must have been in the top super, which had a good dose of smoke before I removed it to get at the bottom super for giving drawn frames to the lower super. As I said earlier, I found her body on the inner hive cover. It was upside down with no sign of life. As soon as I found her moving (and as my eldest son put it "suffering from confusion due to finding herself in a strange place of solid yellow plastic"), I put her in the entrance of hive one. Immediately bees rushed out of the hive and surrounded her. The bee count outside that corner of the hive went from twenty to over a hundred. I saw bees feeding her. Then she must have gone under the hive bottom, because next I saw her, she was walking on top of the foot (side) of the hive bottom going in the direction of the entrance. Then I lost track of her and the number of bees outside dwindled.

So I have a new question. How likely is it that this queen will recover fully from smoke inhalation, if that's what caused this occurrence? She must have been knocked out a good hour. Should I still requeen in case she's now too feeble?


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## seamuswildhoney (Jul 24, 2008)

*queenless*

lucky for you! Just today I read about queen rearing methods used by our ancestors. One thing you could do is move the queen to a queen less hive ( I hope she is clipped. A swarm would be very untimely ) and the hive she came from will make a queen as long as the hatched brood is less than three days hatched. The other thing you could do is cut one row of less than three day old brood and attach it to a top bar facing down, you will need a basting brush and some melted wax to attach strip of brood to the top bar and strengthen the sides with almost congealed wax ( not to hot so as not to hurt the brood ).Then after the strip of brood is attached take every other brood out. In a queen less hive the worker bees will tear down the worker cells and build queen cells overnight! Then they will float the cells in royal jelly. You could have more queens than you can use in less time than you can have them shipped!


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## thinkharder (Jun 13, 2008)

Not so lucky. She's still outside the hive entrance and on her side. There are bees covering her, but she's just not recovering. :-(


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## jeff123fish (Jul 3, 2007)

supersedure? sounds like she has been replaced already? I would give it a couple of days and check for another queen or queen cells


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## thinkharder (Jun 13, 2008)

Possibly. I'll give it a week and look for eggs or new cells. There were no eggs in there, so she may have been failing for a few days now. Plus the bees were acting really weird before I checked the hive. So many bees flying about. Neither of the other hives was that active.


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## alpha6 (May 12, 2008)

Requeen. I noticed several for sale. By the time a new queen emerges, mates and starts laying it will be the end of the month or later. You can have a queen on Tuesday and her laying by Friday if you order one. Getting late in the season but...you could try it as an experiment. Sometimes those turn out to be some of the best stock.


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## thinkharder (Jun 13, 2008)

She was still crawling about near the entrance this morning. I lifted the lid and put her inside, though I doubt it'll do much good. I thought she'd go in by herself, but no such luck. She's still acting really feeble.


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## thinkharder (Jun 13, 2008)

I ordered two queens from a local queen breeder. I figure better get two in case I screw up. I'll just re-create nuc three and maybe go into the winter with three hives after all. If I don't screw up. Poor queen. I have no idea if I oversmoked her or if she was already ailing.


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## alpha6 (May 12, 2008)

Don't be too hard on yourself. Smart move with the two queens. If one is looking weak going into winter you can alway combine. Good Luck.


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## thinkharder (Jun 13, 2008)

*two new queens*

Today the new queens arrived. Luckily, we have good weather today, the only good day for a week and the only good day for days to come.

So I opened hive one and found queen cells and queen cells and more queen cells. Frames that didn't even have brood beforehand were put into use for queen cells. I had at least six frames with queen cells in evidence. I destroyed a good twenty cells. 

I then took half the brood to the new hive three, along with some honey frames, and put the one queen in there. The remaining brood stayed with hive one and the other queen went in. So I have three hives out there again. Hopefully in seven days I'll find the queens accepted and I'll still have three hives out there. I'd like to close the warm season with three hive strong enough to survive the winter. If not, at least two.

Karen


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## Jeffzhear (Dec 2, 2006)

thinkharder said:


> "... Hopefully in seven days I'll find the queens accepted and I'll still have three hives out there. I'd like to close the warm season with three hive strong enough to survive the winter. If not, at least two. Karen"


I installed queen cages in NUC's on Saturday and Sunday. The ones installed on Saturday were all released (the bees ate the candy) by Monday evening. The ones installed on Sunday evening were all released when I checked an hour ago. You might check in a few days to find the queens walking around on the frames. This way you know earlier if they are accepted vs later.


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## thinkharder (Jun 13, 2008)

I'd love to check earlier, but I've got rain predicted until next Monday. If I'm lucky, Friday might give me a small weather break, but it's 80% precipitation (thunderstorms). 

This is a bad season for the bees getting out of the hive. We've had more rain days that not. The rivers are flooding up the banks.


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## thinkharder (Jun 13, 2008)

Continuing the saga of the dead queen and succeeding disasters: I bought two new queens and split the hive so that one queen would go into a nuc. The primary hive seemed to accept the queen. Found her laying eggs, but not many. The second hive started making a lot of noise like they were going nuts in there. I opened the hive and bees came shooting out like mad. I closed the cover (panic reaction) and yes, squished bees. Ok, so I'm thinking maybe they don't like the new queen, but that's not it. 

For weeks now, I'd been wondering why the guy who sold me three hives only had two inner covers. One has a hole for feeding (this fact is important later). The other is solid. Well, guess where I found the third inner cover? Stuck to the bottom of hive two, inside the floor of the hive. Naturally the bees could not get out. So this is five days after putting this nuc together that I realize this. It's my fault of course. I painted the supers and laid a super on this cover, whereupon the paint dried and it got stuck, and then I placed the super on the hive floor. When I realized that the cover was on the bottom of the hive, I called my husband over to pull the cover off the super while I held the super up. He was timid about it (can't really blame him; bees aren't really his thing) and let the cover tilt to the perpendicular at once, letting all the dead bees fall.

Lost a good five hundred bees and thought I lost the second introduced queen because I found no sign of eggs in any frame. So I'm putting the first two hives back together and I look down and see a queen and two workers on the skid. Whoa! Pure luck I didn't step on her. Back into the hive she went.

Three days later, I see the body of the introduced queen of hive one put out of the hive. ****. I wait for the next good day and check all hives (I have three). Second introduced queen is laying eggs, but like the first queen, not many. There are no signs of eggs or queen cells in hive one. I destroyed all when I introduced the queens. Karen's new beek rule: never destroy all the queen cells. Never! Never! Never! Find a way, any way, to keep some handy.

Why? Because I went into my final hive and found what? No queen, no eggs, many queen cells. That's three dead queens. So here I am with a major quandary.

My first queen (2007) and a good layer dies. An apparently accepted, laying queen of 2008 dies a week or so after I get her. The supercedure queen-- that I had my last hive raise--dies. Why?

The clues lead to the sugar syrup change. I tried invert sugar, making it with cream of tartar. I research and discover a reference to cream of tartar being detrimental to bees. 

Out go all the syrup bottles and off I go to mix a new batch. This time I follow the recipe in a book by French beeks (Traité Rustica de l'Apiculture). The recipe includes a small amount of cider vinegar. In the bottles go into the hives. I do more research and see also a reference saying vinegar is bad for bees. Reference does not say what sort of vinegar is bad or if all vinegars are bad. Bangs head on keyboard in frustration. 

More research. Find that many beeks swear by cider vinegar and none complain of dead queens. I decide to leave the syrup in the hive.

Yesterday I took the three frames of queen cells from hive three and split them between hives. I left hive two alone in the hopes the introduced queen survives (I'll check tomorrow), but I made a fourth hive for the third frame of cells. Today I see a pale queen getting tossed from the hive. I'm thinking "What the f--- is with these bees in hive one?"

So I open the hive and discover the facts. A virgin queen has emerged and she's getting rid of competition. Ok, good. I did those frame switches in the nick of time. I see two queens running about in there, at first grappling and then just running about and looking at other queen cells. So I run back home, grab the queen cages and a butter knife. I put the least active queen in one (don't want to take the stronger queen). I also take out one of the last queen cells and put it into the second queen cage just in case. I open hive four to store these and see a queen on the top of what I used for in inner cover.

Remember one inner cover had a hole for feeding? So I decide I don't want to use that this time and put on one of those things that make the bees go in one direction when you want to get rid of them from honey supers. Only I put it on upside down. So here's a queen, looks nice and brown likes she's hatched for a while, stuck above the hive, all alone and confused.

Stupid! Aaaargh!

She won't let go of the cover and I don't want to squish her. I get grass, get her on it, lower her between frames and shake her off. I lose sight of her at once and don't know if she's ok. 

The queen in a queen cage and the queen cell in a cage went into this same hive for safe keeping. I didn't have time to check the hive with the last frame of queen cells, so I'll be doing that tomorrow along with checking the last introduced queen.

So. My first year has been disastrous for queens. I felt like hell for trapping and killing all those bees, then poisoning the queens. I figure they get fed syrup more often than any other bees. Of course they'd die first.

No cream of tartar in bee syrup. Ever.


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## thinkharder (Jun 13, 2008)

I managed to keep one spare queen alive in a queen cage. The other virgin queen, the second that I saw running around in hive one, died. She was the slow one, so probably she was stung by the stronger. But the queen cell had a nice strong queen in it.

Yesterday, my husband built two top bar mating nucs (four bars, entrance on bottom). I filled one with a cup of bees and released the cork on the queen cage). Today, the queen is doing fine and the bees seem to have settled in. They're eating my first attempt at bee candy (has both lemon oil and peppermint in it). They've eaten a lot of it already. Amazing for such a small number of bees. 

Hive four had few bees and it looked like there was robbing going on. I dumped more bees in there after checking to see if the virgin queen was still present and healthy. She was. 

Hive two's intro queen has laid a lot of eggs. Whew! The syrup with cider vinegar has apparently done no harm.

We have a week of good weather. I'm hoping for good luck with the mating and lots of eggs in the four hives. If the spare queen in the mating hive isn't needed, I'll just put her on top of a hive with a queen divider in between. 

I may actually have bees to winter over after all, despite my inept beekeeping.


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## thinkharder (Jun 13, 2008)

*three successes with matings, four queens total*

So out of four virgin queens, three successfully did their mating flights. Along with the remaining replacement queen I purchased, I now have four queens. They all look healthy, and the HBH recipe I used in the syrup (with an emulsifier) seems to be readily accepted and causing no problems to the bees themselves. However, the two strongest hives have gone overboard filling burr comb areas with excess syrup and may be crowding the queens. 

One frame (has plastic foundation) was improperly drawn and has a cave beneath the outer face and the foundation. This was where one queen decided to hide when I wanted to mark her. I had to smoke her out.

This was also my first day for marking queens. I used a tube with a foam plunger to keep them still because I wasn't sure how steady my hands would be. Good thing I had the plunger because my hands were really shaky today. I managed to get all the queens marked despite that two jumped off the frame and onto the ground and the one hid in her little grotto and had to be smoked out into the open.

Now I must wait to see if the two smaller nuc hives can build up fast enough before the cold season comes on. We have wonderful weather this autumn so far.


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## seamuswildhoney (Jul 24, 2008)

*Relax*

Karen I read your posts about your queens, you need to relax! When you have a hive open you may not need to smoke, I seldom do, some bees dont need it. When you are looking for a queen, make a place to sit and relax when you are looking, take it slow, dont make hasty decisions. The bees can sense if you are all jittery. Most of the time when I work with my bees I am completely unprotected. If I am even in a hurry the bees can sense it. Slow down and enjoy your bees and you will make alot less goofs!


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## thinkharder (Jun 13, 2008)

I was very relaxed. Don't mistake my shaking for nerves. That's nothing to do with it. And I'm usually unprotected as well (shorts, t-shirt and baseball hat). Only one queen had to be smoked out, like I said because of the cavern between comb and foundation.


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