# Advice needed on a balled queen



## kilocharlie (Dec 27, 2010)

Go ahead and lock her into her hive with #8 hardware cloth. Feed the hive profusely, and import real pollen, and open nectar from other hives as often as necessary. 

4 days before grafting, isolate her in a Pritchard box, so she can lay in 1 to 3 combs (mark the date on the top of the frame) and the workers can get to her to tend her.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

Too late, I forgot to closed the screen door and she disappeared
the next day when I check they cage. So somehow I think they got
rid of her overnight. Luckily, I got a mated daughter from her the same
copy before her death. So the bee saga continues...


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## Robbin (May 26, 2013)

beepro said:


> Hi, All!
> 
> So almost every year I struggle with this problem of the balled queen.
> Right now there is a queen that I like to graft from. One bee got in
> ...


Hi Beepro,
I've never heard of this before. If bees from another hive get into the wrong hive, they can cause the hive queen to get balled? I've found queens being balled in my hives, but they were virgins.
but I end up with queenless hives and don't know why.


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## AstroBee (Jan 3, 2003)

Robbin said:


> I've never heard of this before.



I have to agree that I don't totally follow what the issue was. The way it is written suggests that you have (I guess had since she's dead) a breeder queen that you wanted to graft from and when you opened the hive another bee (from a different colony) attacked this queen. Is this right? Further, are you saying that once she was attacked that her own colony killed her, and that this is common occurrence for you? Unless I misinterpreted your words, and based on experience, this seems to be a VERY rare event. Sure I've had foreign bees come sniffing around when a queen was exposed, but other resident bees were very quick to rectify the situation, but even this is quite rare in my experience. I guess I'm a little unclear as to why the breeder was even exposed for any period of time to begin with. Was the queen in question established and laying in this colony or was there an introduction in process? Sorry, I don't think I understand the situation.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

This is an established laying queen.
The balling occurred when a foreign bee from
a nearby hive got in the hive and bit the queen.
Her own bees trying to free her to no avail. This created
a balling situation that soon nobody recognized their queen
anymore because of the bee attack scent on her all over. The
foreign bee got her jaws locked on the queen's hind
right leg. I discovered this while checking on the
hive for larvae to graft. Yes, the bee is from a different
hive because I have the dark Russian X carnis and the Italians
Cordovan too. 
To me, this is not a rare event. Every summer I lost mated laying
queens because of the bees got in the wrong hive. The hives are placed
very close to each other. Sorry for the dead queens. 
My only solution is to put the hives farther apart and
not next to each others on the same row. Maybe this will solve the
queen balling issue that I have. Don't worry though because I graft
my own queens here. Any loss queen I will just replace her with another
mated one. In a way I always have mated queens for the back up just in case.
From early Spring until late Autumn I keep on making queens. I have 10 cells
all filled up with RJ now. Four more days then they should be capped. 
If you end up with queen less hives then chances are they got balled. It doesn't
matter if she is a virgin or a mated queen. So watch out for the foreign bee. This
is also the same situation that adding a frame of the foreign bees into another hive
trying to boost the hive population will result in a balled queen. The only way to not
have a balled queen is by adding the nurse bees and newly hatched young bees onto the frame
with a small tweezers. Hand pick is hard work and time consuming but no balled queen. So the
next time you want to save a balled queen consider this only option.
Lucky for me this dead queen has produced a daughter that look just like her without the red paint on.
She is already mated but her hind right leg is handicap because of a balling earlier on returning from her
mating flight. One more week I should bee some eggs if all goes well.


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## Robbin (May 26, 2013)

Thanks beepro, I lose queens for no apparent reason, there one week laying fine and gone the next. This is at least a possible explanation. I have all my hives in a row, facing the same direction. 
I think I will alternate the direction they are facing. I do that on my paired mating nucs, but they are touching each other, I don't see a down side to alternating the entrance directions. I've just recently
gone with reduced entrances on a permanent basis. Don't know if that will help prevent this or not. Much smaller entrances are much easier to guard. Less likely for a strange bee to enter the wrong hive
without being confronted.


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## kilocharlie (Dec 27, 2010)

AstroBee said:


> ... another bee (from a different colony) attacked this queen. Is this right? Further, are you saying that once she was attacked that her own colony killed her, and that this is common occurrence for you? Unless I misinterpreted your words, and based on experience, this seems to be a VERY rare event. ...


This occurs a bit more often out here where there is some AHB genetics. Those lil' beeches do come straight in and attack the queen. That is why they are such good usurpers of other colonies.

Best solution? Keep VERY STRONG colonies, use internal feeders in the top box (if using bottom entrances), use robbing screens before the dearth.


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## AstroBee (Jan 3, 2003)

kilocharlie said:


> This occurs a bit more often out here where there is some AHB genetics. Those lil' beeches do come straight in and attack the queen. That is why they are such good usurpers of other colonies.
> 
> Best solution? Keep VERY STRONG colonies, use internal feeders in the top box (if using bottom entrances), use robbing screens before the dearth.



I've seen usurpation in action and I've seen young laying queens balled when disturbed too early after getting introduced or mated. What I've never seen is a lone bee (which beepro seems to be suggesting) enter a hive and attack the queen. I understand that if this occurred a balling event may very likely start. Even if it happened the likelihood of observing it seems pretty remote. Seems more likely that once the frame with the queen has been removed from the hive you could see this start. In my yards these scenarios would be considered very rare. I guess I'll consider myself lucky.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

In my beekeeping years I have seen stranger things happened to
my hives. Somehow my life is not your usual normal one. My first year I
started grafting after the 2 hives died due to the ants. I put them
on top of an ant hill. That was 4 years ago.
Now I'm still learning and every year it seems more strange in my bee yard.
We don't have the AHB here yet. They are all the normal bees. Still my set up
has caused many queen deaths. On top of that my own human errors killed a lot
of good queens too. So every time I keep on making improvement on my queen rearing
operation hoping to compensate. It helps a lot when you know how to make queens for
the many summer queen death. This balling issue happened a lot like Robbin described.
One day she is still there and the next day she is gone. The eggs still laid fresh inside
the hive. I fumble through these incidents a lot over the years without any solution until
I saw what had happened recently. I suspected this issue last summer but was just too busy
replacing the dead queens. Now I know. So will spread out the hives to maybe fix this issue
in the future. Yes, I only saw one bee from a different hive biting the queen. But who knows how
many got inside and the resident bees had killed them. Without other evidence this is what I will
go by for now. I will keep on expanding until one day I cannot handle the number of hives I have.
Every time I went inside the hive there is a camera with me to capture the moment.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

So after the mom, marked queen died her only daughter somehow
got mated about 2 weeks ago. Today I check on the nuc hive running out
of patience. Well lucky me! I saw 2 newly laid fresh eggs. 
They are the same size like the grandma before. At least this will give me some
hope to do another graft on my next round. Bee resources are getting low now.
Need to find some drawn comb real soon.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

Not all queens died this way. I have a second year
queen that has a right hind leg bit off during her return mating flight.
I wanted to replace her but they never did. So since she carry the good
genetics I saved her for grafting as a back up just in case all the other mated
queens got balled this summer.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

I think there is some kind of other beekeeper error going on here. It would be necessary to see the hives being worked to see what is going on.

For me, I have sometimes seen queens get balled, almost always something I did or should not have done. However to break up a queen getting balled use smoke.

Is there robbing happening Beepro?

I once had a customer who purchased some nucs from me, saying he had bought bees from other vendors and they were all useless, kept going queenless. He lived near me so I took them over & installed into his hives myself. A few weeks later he rings and says some of them are queenless, so to do the right thing I go over to put it right. I discover queen cells just hatched, and he says he worked the hives a couple of weeks ago, pretty obvious what happened. Anyhow I watch over the hives till the virgins mate and are laying. Then, he rings me again. More hives queenless. I go and fix it. But then more similar phone calls, and starting to blame me. I realise that for some reason, this guy kills queens EVERY time he opens the hives. After trying to prop him up for a season, and he did actually get some honey, I advised him to give up beekeeping. He didn't want to but I had got to where I dreaded his phone calls, and told him I just could not put more time into sorting out his issues. He told me he would continue but I was unsurprised when he rang me maybe 6 months later saying he had no more bees and wanted me to sell him some. I told him no.

Not saying that's you Beepro, but there must be something else going on if you lose your breeder queen every time you open the hive. AHB has been suggested, but you say there are none.


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## mac (May 1, 2005)

So I had a swarm in Feb way too early for this part of Fl. No drones or drone cells in any hive but they all flew back to the hive. Upon inspecting for swarm cells ( there weren’t any or drone cells) but they were balling the queen smoked them well and broke them up. Saw no eggs or larva so added a frame from another hive didn’t make any q cells but saw eggs a couple of days later. Guess she made it. Very strange for a swarm in Feb.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

Thanks, OT and mac for sharing yourid not make it after she got balled. But she is
laying fine after 2 weeks waiting. Some eggs already turn into
larvae today. So not all queens got balled as this one's daughter is
from the N.Y. location that I bought her last Autumn. I'm changing genetics
now and spaced out the hives further apart to avoid the bees going into
the wrong hive. And I don't think it is my error after going through so
many hive inspections before. Anyways, I made 7 nucs today with the capped
queen cells. Figured at least 4 will make it back after her mating flights.

Mated Russian daughter queen:


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