Beekeepers diagnose a failing queen by her small size, patchy brood, and lack of eggs. They reject the colony's own supersedure cell because the brood is poor, then remove the bad queen and introduce fresh brood to let the bees raise a healthy replacement.
Maya has found a queen bee that is failing, and in this video I'm going to show you how she fixes it.
That is a failed mated queen. She's very small, patchy brood, not laying eggs, and there is a single supersedure cell in the colony. How do you fix this?
So this is on 2025. Okay, we will change again the queen.
Okay, so show me how you— she's gone.
Really don't trust the cells in this case. No, when the brood is bad, don't trust Okay, okay, that's interesting. So we prefer to leave the cell but to give them also a new frame of fresh brood.
Okay, so horrible thing to do when you have a queen that is failing this bad. They do not trust the cell. So what he's going to do here is take that queen cell down, add in a fresh frame of brood into that colony. They're going to be queenless. They're going to raise their own queens from that new frame of brood, and then they will supersede that queen. And within a few weeks' time, they will have a brand new queen. I know that's a horrible thing to do. If Gaia didn't kill that queen, this entire colony would be dead. So necessary evil to make sure that your bees are healthy.
