What's Wrong With My Bees? - Drone Laying Queen

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. I am in the orchard apiary today preparing nucs to send them out to customers, so I'm going through each and every nuc. Some of the bees, as you can see, I've got a nice collection on my shoulder there, um, they've probably never been out of the hive before, so I've had to crack each one open, doing all of my inspection checks, checking for the queen, checking for brood in all stages, checking for disease, checking for food, just getting them ready. While I'm doing all of these checks, what I'm gonna show you in today's video is a drone-laying queen. Really frustrating when you find drone-laying queens, especially in a colony like this, 'cause you look at them from the top and you think everything's fine. You pull a couple of frames out, covered in drone brood, no worker brood. It's a really, really annoying thing to happen at this time of the year. You get drone-laying queens early in the season. Because the queens have gone out late in the season, they're not mated properly. So like I say, I've got a few bees flying around. I've got like a significant collection on my shoulder there where they don't know where to go, so they think I'm home. I'm going to get my hood back up, I'm going to open this colony up, show you a few frames, show you what an early season drone-laying queen colony looks like, and I'm going to show you what I'm going to do with it as well. So out of the 20-odd colonies that I've got here, I've got one that's a drone layer. All of the rest of them are good to go to customers. Some of them are bursting at the seams. going to make excellent nucs for our customers. So we'll get inside here and show you what it looks like. So it's really strange because this colony, it's taken down so much feed. Every single time I lift the lid off, there's loads of bees. They're drawing comb up in the roof. This was my banker. This was the colony I thought, wow, this is going to be a really big strong colony. I'm probably going to have to double this up before I send it out to anyone. And yeah, it just works like that. It obviously has become drone laying relatively recent. You You wouldn't have this number of bees, I wouldn't have thought, going through the winter and then turning into a drone-laying colony. So don't be annoyed if you have a big colony that turns drone layer like this, it's just what happens. So yeah, absolutely loads of bees at the bottom of the feeder, loads of bees in the top of the feeder. If you look in the colony, looks really nice. Like when I opened this one up, I thought, yep, absolutely fine, no problems here, full of bees. Find that queen, check she's okay, mark her up. Move on to the next one. It's only when you pull the frames out that you realise something's wrong with this colony. There you have it, straight into drone-laying queen. Really frustrating. I hate it. I hate losing colonies. I hate drone-laying queens. It's the worst part of beekeeping for me, but it's just a fact of life and you just have to accept it. This is a drone-laying queen. Something wrong with her. No good. My view, and this will be different to a lot of people's view, a lot of beginners and a lot of people who keep kind of 2 or 3 colonies, They would put the resources in to save this, so they're probably going to squish the queen, buy in another queen if they possibly can. If you're in the season, squish the queen, try and add eggs, numerous frames of eggs over the case of 3 or 4 days. Frame of eggs, another frame of eggs, another frame of eggs, and just try and get them to, to pull out an emergency cell. It's not my strategy though. What I do is I try and find the queen and kill her and shake them out, and they can go into the other nucs and boost up the strength of all the other nucs. I don't want to risk them messing up all of my comb. These combs here you can probably reuse some of them as outer frames in the nucs. That's just my strategy and that's what I do with my drone laying colonies. On to the next frame, again loads of bees. I tend to find the drone layers aren't really as strong as this because where are all those worker bees coming from, but it does happen and as you can see in the middle of this one here you have got a bit of worker brood, so I think she's turned drone laying Maybe over the past 4 to 6 weeks. Good resources here though, in terms of the number of bees. And again, my strategy is to shake them out. They will find other places to go in the colony. Do it on a nice warm day, which it is today. They'll go out, they'll fly, they'll find somewhere else to go, and you get the strength of those bees into your other nucs, into your other colonies, without the issue of laying workers or without the issue of a drone laying a queen. So there you go, another nice big frame of bees. Tons of bees on here. 3rd frame full of drone brood, Full of bees, haven't found the queen yet, but yeah, what a shame. Like I say, you look at this colony from above, you probably look at it from afar as well and think, nice, that's a nice nuc of bees, I'd be happy with that. And no, it's, uh, it's pretty much no good because the queen's obviously a dud. So we're gonna pack them back up, shake them out, move on. So now we're on to a nice frame of stores there, perfectly good frame of stores, nothing wrong with that. We can just take that out, go and put that into another colony, build them up if they need it. There you go, next frame, absolutely jam-packed full of stores again. We'll take that, we'll use that on another nuc. Nothing wrong with it at all. Strange, isn't it? They've taken down their food, they've taken down the stores, there's lots of bees, and it's just a dud queen. Too early in the year at the moment for mated queens, probably a good few weeks away. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to shake out the colony, move the box, because otherwise they're all just going to come back into the box, and I'll boost all of the colonies around. So there you go, that's it for the video. Drone-laying queens early in the season, real nuisance, but I don't dwell on them. I shake them out, I boost up all of the other colonies around me, clean out the boxes, reuse whatever I can. There was a nice pollen frame in there, there was a nice brood frame in there, lots of stores. Reuse what you can, melt down what you can't, get some more bees in there later in the season and make up the numbers with a split. This is no-nonsense beekeeping, and please don't think that I'm cherry-picking colonies to show you to say, this is a really good colony of bees and this is what all my colonies of bees look like. I have colonies that have disease, I have colonies with chalk brood, sac brood, I have drone-laying queens, I have queens that aren't mated, I have laying workers, I have all of the rubbish that comes with beekeeping and all of the really annoying things as well as all of the really good things. And I will always show you every little bit what goes on in my beekeeping operations because I think it's a good learning tool for you and for me to talk about it as Well, so as always, thanks for watching. Hope you enjoyed the video. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.