Beekeeper Laurence Edwards explains why he's letting a colony with a drone-laying queen die rather than rescue it. The queen can only lay drones, so no workers will be born and the colony will collapse. He weighs interventions like introducing a new queen or moving the bees, but decides the colony lacks the healthy workers and resources to justify the risk.
I'm going to let this colony of bees here die over winter. Now that sounds horrific, doesn't it? I'm actually going to go out of my way to let this colony die, but it's not quite as straightforward as it sounds. So the problem that we've got with this colony here is that the queen has turned drone laying. She can't lay fertile eggs, she can only lay drones. There's going to be no more worker bees, no more bees that can go out and forage any honey, and it just means that the colony is going to dwindle away to nothing. Now I know that sounds harsh and you think, well, you're a beekeeper, why aren't you doing your very best to save that colony? And there are a few things that I could do to save this colony here. One, I could add a mated queen, but it's way too late for that. I don't have any spare mated queens. So if I was going to give them a mated queen, I'd have to steal it from another hive and then that other hive would die. The second thing I could do is I could take this frame here and I could shake out all of the bees and let them go into other hives nearby. And I do do that on regular occasion. I'll go in, I'll find a colony that's got a drone-laying queen, I'll shake them out in front of a strong hive and I'll let all of those worker Bees go in. But I'm not doing that today, and I'm not doing that today for a very specific reason. This colony of bees has just gone way, way too far. There is no bringing it back. I can't add a mated queen; it's too late. I'm not going to shake them out because there is just not enough decent resource within this colony for me to give it to any other colony and make any difference. I've got incredibly old worker bees. I've got old drones. I've got new drones that are no good. to any colony at this point in the year. But what I also have here is a huge amount of risk. And the risk here is that if I shake a colony like this in front of some strong colonies, all of the bees here are going to try and get in. Now, they might adopt some of the younger worker nurse bees, if there even are any in this colony, but those worker bees could also go into another colony and kill that queen. There is an element of risk. So what I have to do at the end of the season when I'm analyzing my drone laying colonies like this is, Is there any value in there? And does the value outweigh the risk? If I've got a colony full to the brim with worker bees and they've just turned drone laying, I'll definitely shake them out in front of 2 strong colonies. And that way I'm using the value and I'm accepting the small risk. But with a colony that's failed as bad as this one here, there isn't anywhere near enough value to justify the risk of shaking them out. So I'm really sorry, bees, but unfortunately you are going to die over winter. Now I'm not going to do anything harsh. I'm not going to go and kill them. All I'm going to do is I'm just going to wait until it gets a little bit too cold, the bees stop flying, and then once those bees stop flying for this season, I'll just close that entrance disc over, seal the bees inside, wait for them to die, and then I'll clean everything up.
