Rural Gardening: New hive problems, 1 by Riversdale

Riversdale wrote:
Hi everybody,
It's been a while, so I wanted to bring you up to date on the status of my hive problem.

I was really hesitant to do the procedure that I spelled out previously. Being so new to beekeeping, I did not fully trust my own eyes with what I was seeing. So I took some pictures and sent them to a friend who is a very experienced beekeeper, just to get his confirmation that I was correctly diagnosing the problem. He immediately agreed that I indeed had only drone brood in the hive.

You can see in the attached picture that all of the capped brood cells are yellowish in color, and have a protruding domed cap. Drones are larger than workers, so they require a larger cell to develop. A worker bee brood cell should have an almost flat cap that is tanish in color. The white colored capped cells that you see I believe is honey, or nectar. You can also see some developing pupae in some cells before they are capped. You should be able to zoom in and get a good look.

Once I got the confirmation that I needed, I ordered a new queen. When she arrived, I performed the shake -out procedure. Let me tell you, I had a bunch of angry bees!!

After returning the empty hive to its original location, I installed the new queen. There were quite a few bees already at the hive location waiting for me when I arrived with the hive. It didn't take long at all for most of the bees to return.

I checked in on the hive after three days, and the queen had still not been released from her cage. So I helped things along a little by poking a hole in the candy that plugged her exit hole. I checked back two days later and she was out. That was about a week ago.

Since then I have been watching the activity at the hive entrance, and have observed worker bees dragging out newly hatched drones and dropping them on the ground around the exterior of the hive. The ants then quickly take care of them. I guess this is an effort to bring population balance back to the hive.

My biggest concern now is time. I am afraid that the aging workers that I have left might not live long enough for the new workers to hatch out. It takes around 21 days for an egg to develop and hatch. From what I have read, the life span of a worker bee in the summer time is only a few months and I have had my bees since April 13th.

I am going to leave them alone for three or four weeks hoping that if I don't stress them any more they will live longer.

That's it for now, I will give another update later on and hopefully have some good news to tell.