So, What Happened?

I haven't posted to the blog in a long time, over a month now. I just haven't had my heart in it. The new replacement queen I bought didn't make it. She never was freed from her cage - why? I will never know exactly - perhaps it's too late in the season, perhaps the other bees in the hive were distracted, perhaps there is something else that caused it. Whatever the reason, the end result is that she was never freed, and now there is no queen in this hive, and despite trying yet again to purchase another queen within 10 days of this last purchase, now it IS too late. The suppliers are not shipping this late into the season, it is too cold.

So what happens now? Well, without a queen in the hive, there are no new bees being born. As the hive bees die off naturally from old age, and without new bees being born daily to replace them, the hive slowly dies off. It may be a poor analogy; but, it becomes like an old age/nursing home, excepts that it lacks the attendants, and there are no new residents coming in. I suspect that by mid-December it will be a bee-less hive. A home without occupants.

The typical lifecycle of a worker bee is: egg (3 days), larva (6 days) and pupa (12 days) for a total of 21 days from egg (baby) to adult worker.

The average age for a worker bee (excluding the winter months) is 45 to 60 days ... longer during the winter months as they nominally cluster around the queen in the hive to maintain heat.

A week ago I went into the hive to see what was going on. There were still bees in there; but, not many. I'd guess probably 300-400. So if I work a timeline backwards, I would assume that those bees were born perhaps 30 days before, or around the beginning of October, those eggs would have been laid about the end of the first week or so in September. Looking back at my blog posts, I was writing about doing the sugar dustings back then, and I know I had a thriving bee population at that time. Conclusion? My guess is that somehow, perhaps as I was moving supers around, pulling a frame, and doing the sugar dusting, I must have inadvertently crushed and killed my original queen. I reason that had she swarmed off, there would have been a successor left in her place, and there wasn't. So somehow this queen perished, and without a queen, the hive is doomed.

So, lessons learned the hard way, I will start over again in the spring. This time around, I will get that second hive setup and maintain both hives. With a year's experience behind me (older and hopefully wiser), I can then check and compare the status of each hive. I will pay more attention to my dusting technique, and hopefully the outcome next year will be different.

Yes, I am disappointed with this year's outcome.


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