Laurence Edwards shows how to save a colony with a drone-laying queen by removing the failing queen and introducing an early-mated F1 Buckfast queen. Four weeks later, the hive has recovered with abundant worker brood, honey stores, and far fewer drones.
4 weeks ago, this colony here was a drone-laying queen. I went in, I fixed it. I promised you I'd be back to show you the results. So today we're going to go in and show you the results of fixing a drone-laying queen in the spring. So if you remember back to this colony here, we went in, hardly any bees, drone comb on every single frame, found the queen. She was rubbish, she was a dud. We squished her, killed her straight away, and then we added in a new mated queen. We didn't have to wait any time before popping the cages because the pheromone on a drone-laying queen is basically non-existent, so they immediately accept a new queen as long as there's no open worker brood available. This one here was 100% drone brood. We killed the queen, added in a new one, left it for 4 weeks, and today I'm going to show you the results. So the first thing that you'll notice is lots and lots of bees. That is always a really, really promising sign. And also, even better than that, not too many drones. All of that drone brood will have emerged by now. So if you're seeing a huge amount of drones at the top here, that's never going to be a good sign. And also what you can see there is you can see the bees are storing honey. They definitely weren't doing that early on, and there weren't enough bees to build up to a point where this colony can go out and start foraging. Let's get that queen excluder off, then dig inside, see if we can find some frames. So what you can see on the bottom of this frame is a little bit of drone brood. But this one here was mostly worker anyway, full of pollen, full of honey. And there we go, we can see straight into worker brood. Really nice healthy worker brood, pearly white, good pattern. This colony here is fixed already. Another really nice frame there of worker brood, struggling a little bit for space here that you can see. I would expect to see eggs in that center of the frame and they backfilled it all with nectar, so they are struggling for space. We'll get the supers on them today. I've been holding off putting supers on because the weather's been poor, but when I see this, this definitely means you need supers on. So there we go, final frame. This is one of our F1 Buckfast queens that we introduced early on in the year. Take a look at that brood pattern, beautiful. You've got your honey stores, you've got your pollen, and then you've got a beautiful slab of brood in the middle. Take a look at the frame there as well, really nice on the other side. It's so, so easy to fix a drone-laying queen at that point in the year. Just pop in an early mated queen and it will fix your colony and save them from a guaranteed death.
