Some of my earlier beekeeping experiences left me wondering “why me?” or “what next?!” Like my first hive, which turned out to be the quintessential new beekeeper’s nightmare: it died out in just a few months. Womp womp. Maybe it was the general curse of all things bad in 2020?
I installed my bees in May 2020. I named my first queen Martha, after my Gram who passed away in early June 2020. And at the end of June I found the queen, dead, right outside the hive. She was still surrounded by her little retinue, so it had just happened. I wasn’t 100% sure of the cause at the time, but in retrospect, I attribute it to treatment for mites that I applied when it was too hot – newbie mistake. It can be hard on queens. To say I was disappointed was an understatement.
Two days later, I opened the hive, and holy crap! Those ladies had been super busy making replacement queens! There were probably between 25-30 queen cells. I scraped a bunch off and only left the best looking ones. Once a new queen hatches, she goes to the other queen cells and kills the competition, and 30 is too many to leave to chance. Ideally, she’d then be off on a mating flight and return back to business laying eggs. In the meantime, the worker bees kept foraging for pollen and nectar.
Just to keep things interesting, my hive did NOT successfully re-queen itself, even with all those queen cell opportunities. A new queen probably emerged and never made it back from her mating flight. She may have gotten lost or eaten by a bird, etc. After waiting a few weeks just to make sure, I bought a mated queen. She came in a white plastic cage with a few attendants. I stuck the cage onto the wax comb of a frame. The entrance to the cage was plugged with candy (like fondant). This allowed the bees to smell the new queen and get used to her.
By the time they ate through the candy and she was released, they’d accepted her and all was well.
Except it wasn’t.
Because the hive was without a queen for so long, the queen pheromones that suppress the worker bees’ ovary functions were gone, too. So, they rejected the new queen I’d added and elected themselves an unmated worker bee who only laid drone (male) eggs. That is not sustainable for a hive, because drones don’t really do much of anything but mate. I was stuck with a hive with a worker bee who thought she was a queen and wouldn’t stop laying eggs, a bunch of useless drones who did nothing but eat up resources, and it was too late in the season to introduce another queen. They’d been queenless for so long it was unlikely they’d accept her, anyway. If I had another hive, I could have tried to combine them, but alas, I had just the one.
So, I made the tough call to leave the bees alone, and eventually the hive died out. The remaining female worker bees did their best to keep the hive going, but with no new bees, it was fruitless. Their numbers dwindled, the drones died without any resources, and I cleaned up my equipment, determined to start the 2021 season with two hives and a renewed enthusiasm (after I cried, of course).