Making Use of a Failing Honeybee Queen

What do you do when a honeybee colony is failing because of an old queen? Move her to another colony? This episode might be titled "I do dumb stuff so you don't have to" because in it I try to use a failing queen from one colony to help another. This video includes the effort and the outcome so watch to see if the gambit works.
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I grew up on a farm on the edge of the Nebraska sandhills. A cattle ranch that bears our family name, founded in the late 1800s by my ancestors, is still owned and worked by my cousin. Life events have put me in the suburbs of a major metropolitan area in middle America, where my wife and I have raised our two kids. It's in this environment that I work to make as sustainable a life as I can, converting much of our backyard to grow food, including a garden, fruit trees and bee hives.
I attempt to use natural methods, as much as is possible, in my gardening and beekeeping. I garden organically and continue to learn to work with the soil and the plants, without the use of chemical supplements, herbicides or pesticides, to improve our harvest. Our honey bees are sourced from local colonies through swarms, trap-outs and cut-outs, and are kept, using treatment-free, natural methods, in Layens horizontal hives.
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[@JamesCrouchX]

Nice looking queen cell. I saw a third smaller nub.

[@dreamer2023]

I like the way you provide the definitions of terms used in bee keeping helping the novice bee keepers and viewers to understand these terminologies.For example, the term 'brood' you said" which means eggs and very young larvae" similarly you also told us what is the "supersedure queen" is. Nice job.

[@SuburbanSodbuster]

Thank you, but I hope my explanation of "brood" didn't mislead. In general, "brood" is developing bees at all stages, up until emergence from the cell. I don't recall exactly what I said in the video, but in referring to "eggs and very young larvae" I may have been reporting just what stages of brood I saw or remarking on the stages of worker brood usable to raise a queen. In any case, I do appreciate your kind words. As I continue learning, my main objective is to help those starting out or following in their own journey. Your comment encourages me that my explanations are helpful.

[@rodneymiddleton9624]

Nice way to manipulate the queen to save both colonies! Thanks!

[@SuburbanSodbuster]

It's great when things work out. Now to see if the second hive raises a queen - but they had plenty of eggs and young brood so that's a good likelihood.

[@lambbrookfarm4528]

Good morning Montie, I have a small colony, a swarm catch from my apiary, that contained a red marked 2022 queen[ correction, a yellow marked queen]. A queen that I actually paid money for, from a relatively close treatment free beekeeper. I will have to keep an eye on this colony to look for signs, supersedure cups, of decline, but after first spring inspection things look good. I like the fact that the colony wintered well, using very little honey, and are gentle, putting up with my meddling's. I think i will keep her in the 7 frame Layens hive she is in. If she continues to lay well, they will outgrow the hive and attempt to swarm. With careful monitoring I will do an artificial swarm, place her in a new box and harvest some queen cells to replace any weak or dead queens, and/or make a split or 2. The prospects are so exciting. Thats for the posting. Take care, Brice

[@SuburbanSodbuster]

Are you certain she's a 2022 queen? Red was the marking color for 2023, so unless she was marked differently from the standard (and there's no rule against that) she would be only in her 2nd year - and that means this could be a good producing year for her. But I'm sure you know when you got her, so if this is actually her third year and you are happy with this queen then this is a good year to make splits from that colony while the queen is still a good layer.

[@floydferguson5366]

Great video!

[@haroldmarsh5156]

Love the way you do things... good lesson

[@SuburbanSodbuster]

Thank you! I'm glad you appreciate the video.

[@tommychew6544]

Great results! I've seen on more commercial related sites where they will add shaken frames of brood from stronger colonies get a queen laying again also. Like you said with her age though she is likely in decline, glad she was able to give it another go and hopefully keep her genetics going. Hopefully area drones will bring in good diversity since you said you have split from her a few times before. Thanks for the video.

[@SuburbanSodbuster]

I don't think that a commercial operation would allow their queens to get this old, so I do think it's a different situation and any tricks to boost her laying would be temporary, at best. As for mating, I keep and track several genetic lines in my apiary, and try to introduce new genetics each year, so should have a good mix if the queens mate locally. But I've heard, recently, that queens fly farther than drones to mate, seeking drone congregation areas outside of the local drones' range, so my backyard apiary's genetics may be moot.

[@houssembenabdallah6599]

To have better emergency queens. I usually go back to the hive after 3 days from being queenless (opening the hive days not included) and I remove closed cells and leaving only 2 or 3 open cells preferably on the extremities of the comb to insure the larvae had much royal jelly as younger as possible. In addition, while removing the unwanted cells, noticed bees salvage the remaining royal jelly. I don't know if it's true but I assume they will use it to feed the remaining queen larvae.

[@SuburbanSodbuster]

Thanks for the tips!

[@VicMun100]

So in the end, what happened to the old queen when you pulled it out of the second hive? 🤔

[@SuburbanSodbuster]

She's gone to the happy flower garden in the sky. 🐝😇

[@PaulDosen]

What do you do with a colony showing signs of decline due to varroa mite parasitism? I couldn't help but notice throughout my years of experience as well as listening to and engaging with some treatment free beekeepers how their philosophy seems deeply rooted in a faith-based, wishful-thinking pseudo-scientific religion more than anything else. What I mean by this is you can place 3 treatment free enthusiasts side by side and have them each explain what is the main contributer to their treatment free success and they will give you 3, perhaps even 4 answers which all are in total and complete contradiction to one another. This seems to happen with all faith-based groups, nobody has the correct answer but they all assume they do and they start splintering off, forming their own groups with their own faith-based ideas appearing more radical and more dysfunctional then the movement's original founders were. Now the treatment free beekeeping community or movement has been given a face-lift, a new look and feel with a new cohourt of purists willing to take the reins and in the process shed more and more of its die-hard members along the way as the idea of reaching the standards of these purists is seen as an impossible bar to reach. The driving force behind all of this is the erroneous claim which states: "anything done to a hive is seen as interfearing with the process of natural selection." If this is the case then, why are any of these purists keeping bees at all? Are you a purist sodbuster, as pure as your unblemished, delusional friend, Senor Rodriguez is? Every time you open a hive and pull a frame out, mites begin falling off the bees, are you then interfearing with the process of natural selection? The cornerstone to Bruce's ideology as well as his other purist friends, is he doesn't believe in helping the bees doing something they should be doing on their own, so when mites fall off of bees during a hive inspection do you see this as helping? I'm curious where do you draw the line when it comes to interfering with the process of natural selection and why? What does your religion, tell you?

[@SuburbanSodbuster]

What do I do? Nothing. If a colony dies, it dies. Natural selection requires loss.

[@PaulDosen]

@@SuburbanSodbuster What are you hoping to achieve by doing this when there are no European mite proof stock out there? You can't select for a bee that you don't have buddy. It's like saying, I want a pig that can resist gravity. So what do you do? You pick the highest building in your state and start throwing pigs off of it in hopes of getting one that can resist gravity. How many pigs do you think you'll need to throw off the building of your choosing before you achieve your goal?

[@SuburbanSodbuster]

You asked a hypothetical question so I gave what my response would be to your scenario. Overall it's not an issue I deal with often. The last colony I had that collapsed, showing evidence of mite borne illness, was 2 years ago - that was a colony that had come from a treating beekeeper.

[@PaulDosen]

@@SuburbanSodbuster It wasn't a hypothetical question sir, it was a reasonable one, one that is often dodged and side-steppd by most treatment free beekeepers (at least the ones I've corresponded with.) Allow me to give you an example if I may: you have 10 red apples in a clear plastic bag, you then throw them into a bucket and are asked to randomly take one out and consume it. Just curious, would you expect to take out a green apple when I only gave you 10 red ones? My point goes back to my inicial statement: you can't select for bees that you don't have, there are no European mite resistant bees out there that can handle varroa totally on their own. The swarms that you are catching and killing come largely from treated operations, people who do their best to manage and control parasites and pathogens within their colonies but don't quite have a good handle on swarm prevention and control. No treatment free beekeeper has been able to identify these feral survivor swarms they claim to be catching, and if these swarms do exist then there genetics by this point would be running the show in every treated colony on the planet by this point and as a consequence, no one would treat for mites, because they wouldn't need to. To hit my point home even further, Bruce Rodriguez claims there is no difference between feral and kept honeybee stocks as he believes that they've both been "watered down" by treating beekeepers. If this is in fact the case, where are you obtaining these "feral survivor swarms" from?

[@SuburbanSodbuster]

It's Ironic that you're posting to ask this on a video in which I'm dealing with a queen going into her 4th season, from which I have several colonies going into their 2nd, and from which I'm continuing to expand. This is one genetic line in my apiary. Thanks for your comments - every interaction helps the KZbin algorithm to promote my videos and my message to more people. You can claim my bees don't exist and they die off each year, but I'm too busy making splits from booming colonies right now to argue.