How to Keep Bees Without a Queen? Practical Methods Explained
The queen bee is the primary reproducer of the entire colony. A colony without a queen will fall into chaos. Sometimes the queen disappears due to natural or human factors, which is not good news for beekeepers. How do you keep bees without a queen?
1. Introduce a Queen
This is the most direct and simple method. Be careful when introducing a queen; at this time the colony's order is extremely chaotic, and the slightest carelessness may cause the worker bees to ball the queen. There are two ways to introduce the new queen. One is to spray both the queen and the colony with some honey solution, then place the queen near the cluster and let her crawl into the cluster on her own; the second is to temporarily confine the queen in a queen cage and place it near the cluster, then spray honey solution near the queen cage, and release the queen after the colony accepts her.
2. Introduce a Queen Cell
A queen cell is a special brood cell in which bees raise a new queen, so when a colony has no queen, you can also introduce a mature queen cell for it. Place a queen cell that has been capped for more than 5 days at the bottom of the frame or in the bee space. At this time, be on guard against worker bees destroying the queen cell. After the queen cell is successfully introduced, the order of the colony will gradually recover
3. Emergency Queen Cells
A few hours after bees lose their queen, the worker bees will begin to work, building emergency queen cells to raise a new queen. At this point, all we need to do is add some frames of eggs and larvae to the colony and do a good job of supplementary feeding. After 1-2 days, the queenless colony will “build emergency queen cells” to raise a new queen.
4. Merge into Another Colony
The last method is to merge the queenless colony into another weak colony to strengthen that weak colony's population. The methods are as follows: one is to spray both colonies with some honey solution and then directly merge the colonies together; another method is to first temporarily separate the hives with newspaper or the like, then place the queenless colony on one side of the hive, then spray honey solution on both sides, and after about half a day the colonies will bite through the newspaper themselves and merge together.
The queen bee is the core of the colony. Without her, the colony cannot be maintained well. During beekeeping, we should respect the bees' way of reproduction and provide them with good living conditions.