I Had To KILL A Queen Bee – Failing Queen And Supersedure Caught In The ACT

The mated queen bee in this colony behind me is failing. She's turning into a drone-laying queen, and unless I intervene today, she is going to be the result of the collapse of this colony. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. In this video, I'm going to find the queen, show you why she's failing, kill the queen, replace the queen, and save this colony. So the reason that I know this queen and the colony is failing here is that they're not building up in the same way as all of the other colonies in the apiary. Way too slow to build up and way too many drones in the colony. Let's open it up and I'll show you exactly what I mean. So although the queen in here is still laying worker brood and the colony is still expanding, it's not expanding at the same rate as the other colonies within the apiary. You can see the bees are still doing their job, they're still drawing out foundation, and they're still using the stores to create stores for the colony, but they're doing it in a very, very haphazard way. Now this top box that I took off over the side here was very, very heavy, and I always notice colonies when you're feeding them and they're incredibly heavy early in the spring, generally a sign that something is wrong. But you look at that frame there, huge, huge frame full to the brim with stores, but no brood on it whatsoever. Now this is incredibly interesting. Wow, I cannot believe that this has actually happened. So the last time that I did this video I said to you that the queen in this colony was failing. I'll snap back to that video now because it didn't work and I didn't finish it because there was a little bit of the video that just didn't film. Inside this beehive here, I have a queen, a pure Buckfast breeder queen that is failing. But what is amazing, what I have just found on this frame here is a superseder queen. Let's see if both of these queens are still running in here at the same time. You hear a lot of people talking about superseder queens. And it's generally swarming. And I guess I'll have to swallow my own advice a little bit here, but look on the outside frame over here, you've got 1, 2, 3 cells that have been created in that corner, and we have got one unmarked queen up here. The queen in this colony was a pink queen with a disc. I think her number was number 49. It was definitely not an unmarked queen, and there definitely weren't any cells over there as well. So as I said, I'll have to swallow my advice a little bit because I normally say anything more than one, you treat it as swarming. But we definitely 100% have a supercedure queen here, and we have 1, 2, 3 emerged cells down there. So what would have happened is those queens would have emerged, they would have had a little bit of a battle. This one here is the victor, and she looks like a very nice queen. She's going around having a little look, seeing where she can lay. So So maybe if we look in this next frame here. Okay, so what we're seeing in this next frame here isn't exactly what I want to see, and I do think this is still like legacy of the old queen. And this is what I was going to show you today. You've got this kind of bumpy brood pattern. I just want to make sure we don't lose that other queen over there. Let me go and put her somewhere safe. Right, so my queen, hopefully my super seizure queen, is nice and safe over here. This is great. I've been coming and doing loads of videos today, and every single time I start a video, I basically get it wrong. So I've got this one wrong as well. But I'm really glad that the bees have taken it upon themselves to supersede and to fix that broken queen. I knew this was a broken queen. I'll flash back to the video and I'll show you the reason why. So these were the signs that this queen here was failing for me. So this is what happens when you get a queen that is starting to fail like this. You get this horribly knobbly, bumpy pattern that doesn't look right. Shouldn't have drone brood and worker brood interspersed in the middle of the frames like that. You've got some neglected brood in there as well because you've got a high prevalence of drone brood where there shouldn't be that much drone brood at this time of the year, and the drone brood is in the wrong position as well. So that frame there, perfect example, that is not right. That is copious amounts of drone brood in the wrong place. If you're seeing that in your colonies, you need to take action because what will happen is that colony will fail and all of your frames will be wasted because they'll all turn into drone brood. If you're seeing that, kill the queen as soon as possible if they're not going to supersede themselves first. So there we go, that was easy. I really want to go inside and see if we can find this artificially inseminated queen that was in here before. I'd love to be able to show a supersedure in action with 2 queens in the colony at once. So I'll run through all of the frames here. I'm going to go down to the bottom because I think that's where I stand my best chance of finding the artificially inseminated queen that has failed. So you can see on here as well, lots of spotty drone brood. Doesn't look good down here. No sign of that queen at the moment though. She might be dead on the bottom of the board. We'll have a look. So just looking in the cells now, I can't see any eggs. And before, when I came in here, the artificially inseminated queen, she was still laying eggs. But I've got some small larvae, so it's probably only 3 or 4 days since that queen is dead. Just looking, I can't see any eggs in there. Doesn't mean that she's not going to be in here though, because she might just have got into a bit of a battle. And you look at that frame there, you wouldn't think anything was wrong with that frame there. Looks like a nice frame. Just looking down to see if I can see that queen anywhere. I'm going to put all of this back together again, and the reason that I'm definitely not going to kill that queen, the superseder queen, is because this was a pure Buckfast colony. So that superseder queen will actually be an F1 queen. So she should be a very, very good queen, one that I will want to keep. So this has actually worked out really, really well for me. Just going to take a quick look in this top frame here, see if we can see that queen anywhere. So nothing in this middle box either. Right, let's put all of our hope back into this top box and see if we can find that queen again. So there's my superseder queen, centre of the frame. So she is an F1 Buckfast, the daughter of a pure Buckfast breeder queen. And I'm glad at least I got one daughter out of that breeder queen. Very expensive breeder queen that's turned drone laying that quick. Will not be using that breeder again unfortunately because I've had a few issues with the supposedly breeder quality of those queens. Never actually taken any daughters from them because they've all died before I've got to that point. But that queen there does look like a nice queen. And like I did have a mated queen ready to go into this colony. The plan was to come in here today, show you the spotty brood, show you why it wasn't acceptable, kill the artificially inseminated queen. Put this queen in, wait eight days, come back, pop the tabs, take down the emergency cells, and requeen them kind of artificially. And the bees have taken it into their own hands, and they have finished her off already for me. So I'm very, very happy about that. And because the weather is so good at the moment, it's like fourth or fifth of May today, but the weather is good. That queen there has got a very, very good chance of mating, if not already mated. Looks like the abdomen is lengthened, but we will wait to see kind of the outcome of. The brood that she starts to lay before we make any bold statements like that. Just going to have a quick look, see if I can find her on these final few frames. And there we go. Look, she is there. So I'm not being made to look entirely stupid here because the artificially inseminated queen is there. I will, with a little bit of embarrassment, swallow my own advice there, which was there was 3 cells, 3 individual cells all close next to each other at the edge of the brood nest. that the bees have used to supersede. So again, take that advice with a pinch of salt because I've always said if it's more than one, treat it as swarming. But if you've got like 20 cells in there, you know 100% that it's going to be swarming. But if you've got like a small cluster of cells at the outside, like the periphery of the brood nest, then maybe it is a supersedure in practice. You just need to kind of judge it for yourself. But there we go, we have one artificially inseminated Drone laying queen that unfortunately I do have to kill her now. It's going to be horrible doing this. There she is. Very fitting that this is the frame that she's on because that is an absolute mess of a frame as a result of poor, not complete, infertile insemination. And I'm really sorry, but you do have to be killed now. So I'm just going to take that queen. Got her in my hands there. Just going to kill her like that. And you can see quick death. She is now dead. Seems like a really, really horrible thing to do, doesn't it? But you know, the bees did that anyway. It's only a matter of time. That queen there would have died, and the other queen would have killed her. And all I've done is I've just come in and kind of speeded up that process a little bit. But that was a perfectly good queen last year, overwintered really well, started building up strong, and then she has just run out of fertile eggs. See the bees coming and making a bit of a fuss of her now. Like, I do feel bad. Never nice killing a queen like that, but it's for the greater good. Like this colony will survive and thrive now and go on to live another day. That queen's genetics will live on. And if I left that queen in here, you never know. She might have killed the super seizure queen and left this colony in a point where they're just going to dwindle and they have no way out. So all I'm doing here is ensuring the survival of those bees. So that's the video complete. I will take this queen. I'll just pop her in there. That'll make the other queen feel really good about herself as well. Kind of like master pheromones a little bit as well, and hopefully allow that super seizure to take place. But the supersedure queen was definitely accepted there, so no problems on that front. Just going to put this colony back together again now, and I'll come back in 2 or 3 weeks, check to see what the brood pattern is like, bearing in mind that you've got all of those dodgy frames in there now that's going to have spotty drone brood everywhere. But you'll be able to see on the newly laid frames if we've got good worker brood, then that was a successful supersedure and one that I got a little bit wrong.