Queenless in the Fall?

In the last few weeks, as beekeepers are helping their bees get ready for winter, we've received many calls and emails with very similar concerns about their queens. Here are just a few examples:

Subject: URGENT! QUEEN NEEDED!

Please help me, my hive has gone queenless and I need to find someone who still has queens for sale. Can you point me to anyone who can help?! I'm so worried that my bees won't make it!

Subject: What to do?

Hi, any advice please. Hive #1 has little to no brood. I plan to start feeding fall syrup. Should I add a second brood box b4 starting to feed? Thinking they need room to store? There are quite a few bees in there. Thank you for your help.

From a phone conversation:

"In each of my two hives, there appears to be no brood at all, and I couldn't find the queen during my inspection, though I often struggle to find her anyway. I'm just not sure what to do…"

Each of these distressed customers contacted us because they thought their queens were dead and their colonies were doomed. How else could they explain the sudden absence of brood and the fact that they couldn't find a queen? So how did we console these customers? We told them to take a breath, and that everything is probably fine.

Close the door, you're letting the heat out!

Just because you didn't see the queen, that doesn't necessarily mean she's not there, so you needn't worry too much if you didn't see her during your fall inspection. In fact, searching through each frame trying to find the queen will expose any developing brood to dangerously low temperatures. Not to mention the risk of robber bees smelling all those exposed combs and coming to steal honey and nectar from the colony that you're inspecting. At this time of year, unless we have a reason to search for the queen we won't hunt her down during inspections of our own hives.

No brood? No problem!

Beekeepers are used to inspections where they don't see the queen, but not finding brood often causes much more concern among new beekeepers. The absence of brood this time of year is perfectly normal and even expected in cooler climates. (In warmer southern states, brood may be present 365 days a year, though a brief "winter break" isn't unheard of either.) By this point many of our colonies have finished up their brood-rearing for the year, and the queen has shut down egg production to get ready for cold weather.

Raising brood can be very costly for a colony since they need to keep the eggs, larvae, and pupae at the correct developmental temperature through the entire development period (three weeks when raising new workers). Bees use far less heating fuel (honey) if they shut down brood production as the weather cools, and only start it up again when spring approaches. That way they only need to keep their winter cluster warm enough to survive, instead of holding it at the 32-36°C (90-96°F) that is required for proper brood development.

You may notice egg-laying that tapers off at different times in different years, perhaps because of a few chilly nights earlier in the fall that trigger the bees to change their behavior. A brood nest packed full of nectar will also limit the number of cells the queen can find to lay in, which contributes to slowing her down. In addition, the date that your queen shuts down egg production is largely influenced by the particular queen herself. Increasingly, queen breeders are paying more attention to when and how a queen tapers off her fall egg-laying, which influences their selection for better and better queens that respond well to their local climates.

Therefore, a broodless colony (or a colony with just a frame or two of brood) isn't any cause for alarm if chilly weather has arrived in your apiary. (If you're keeping bees in Florida, you should be much more concerned about a broodless October inspection than if you're keeping bees in Nova Scotia!)

So what DO these not-so-queenless colonies really need?

First, make sure your varroa mite levels are under control. If you can't quite recall the last time you checked your mite count, or what your last treatment was, your bees will probably benefit from a mite check and perhaps a treatment if it's needed. A booming colony with very high mite levels can die from mites and mite-transmitted viruses very rapidly in the fall, suddenly leaving you with a handful of sick bees and a colony waiting to be robbed by its neighbors.

Second, fall feeding is usually appropriate, and may be required to ensure the survival of your bees. We recommend feeding your bees heavy sugar syrup (click here for an easy recipe to make your own) so that they can pack away some extra "heater fuel" for the winter. Remember that your bees need warm weather to process 2:1 sugar syrup and to remove moisture from it to get it ready for winter storage. Therefore, fall feeding can really only continue while the weather is warm enough for it. Around here, that means feeding until Halloween, but no later.

To prepare for winter, bees densely fill their lower boxes with honey.

If a hive has very little honey stored, you may also want to consider insulating them, to help them reduce their honey consumption. We carry a couple of insulating hive wraps that you can consider, or maybe an insulated outer cover or inner cover to help your bees stay warm. And for next year you may even want to invest in a fully insulated polystyrene hive, so that your bees are always well insulated.

If your bees are taking liquid feed, we encourage you to keep offering them food until it gets too cold to safely do so. You want daytime temperatures to venture above 55°F in the couple of weeks that follow your last feeding. This lets the bees evaporate extra moisture from the syrup, and gives them opportunities to take cleansing flights to expel extra moisture from their intestines.

For all hives, but especially if the hive is going to go into winter with less food than you'd hope, we always have feeding shims ready so that we can put fondant or winter patties onto the hive in mid-winter. That provides them with something to eat when they inevitably run out of honey.

If you'd like to learn more about fall feeding, we have plenty of past newsletter articles on the subject, as well as YouTube videos all about fall feeding. And if your bees don't store enough syrup this fall, this article is all about feeding solid feeds in winter.

What if my colony really is queenless?

All of these tips have assumed that the colonies in question aren't really queenless, but of course the queen is just a mere mortal like the rest of us, and certainly could have died. Either from an ill-fated autumn swarm, illness, age, or a clumsy beekeeper banging things around in the hive, queens certainly can die in the fall. If your colony really is queenless, what should you do? Unless you live somewhere that is still very warm, you are unlikely to have drones available for a freshly-grown queen to mate with, even if the bees do manage to make a new one. At this time of year, a truly queenless colony should either be combined together with another colony, or else you can consider taking their honey away and leaving them to their fate. Either is an acceptable beekeeping practice, but it's likely that the queenless bees will prefer the former option.

Final thoughts

So there you have it. Unless you've gotten very unlucky, your fall queenless colony has a good shot at being a perfectly normal, perfectly queenright colony that is just getting ready for the coming winter weather. If you've got any questions, though, don't hesitate to call us or email us at support@betterbee.com.