Subject: Queenless Hive - What to do?

From: [email-masked] (Greg O'Dell)
Date: 3 May 1996 09:15:02 -0700

I live in Minnesota and upon inspecting my four hives this spring I noticed 
that one of the hive had very few bees and no brood.  My other three hives had 
good populations, active queens and many frames of new brood.  Although I was 
able to find the queen in the week hive, there was no brood.  I decided to 
kill off this hive, clean it out and put in a new package of bees with a new 
queen.  I did this two weeks ago today.  Upon inspecting this new hive, again 
I could not find any brood and I could not find the queen.  I did notice that 
there were about ten queen cells.  I am sure that the origional queen is no 
longer alive.  My problem is that I am not sure what to do.  The two options 
that I am considering are:

Option 1:

Leave the hive alone.  I am thinking that the hive will make a new queen and 
as it is still early May it has plenty of time to recover.  I may take a few 
frames of brood from the active hive and put them in the week hive to help get 
the population up.

Option 2:

Buy a new queen and re-queen the hive.  This would accelerate the making of 
new brood and get the population growing the fastest.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.  Please post suggestions to this news 
group or to my e-mail address at: [email-masked]

Thanks for your help.

---

From: [email-masked] (BCDICKENS)
Date: 5 May 1996 00:54:43 -0400

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
(Greg O'Dell) writes:

>that one of the hive had very few bees and no brood.  My other three
hives
>had 
>frames of brood from the active hive and put them in the week hive to
help
>get 

I would reccommend going with option 2.  My first problem with Option 1 is
if you couldn't find any brood then where did the workers find the egg to
make a queen cell ? The real problem with the first option is the time
factor and the risks involved with the making and then breeding of a new
queen. Save yourself and the hive time and aggravation, simply buy a new
queen.  Good luck. 

Boyd C Dickens