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  • From: Hamsiba Family <hamsibas AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: Orange County Beekeepers Association <ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [ocba] To requeen or not to requeen
  • Date: Sun, 3 May 2015 16:37:40 -0400

Randall,

I have seen lots of info on timing of queens. Is there a rule of thumb on when the threat of laying workers really starts to get likely?

It seems that it must be more than a few weeks as we are often told to wait a few weeks to see what is happening.

Just trying to up my mentoring game.

Thanks, Brad

On May 3, 2015 2:35 PM, "Randall Austin" <ra41717 AT gmail.com> wrote:
George,

It is way too early to expect to see evidence of a queen. The article <here> discusses the queen development timeline that you can use to find the earliest possible date that you may see eggs. The earliest you can usually expect to see eggs after swarming is a little less than 3 weeks, but this depends on a host of factors. As a practical matter, brood at least 3 or so days old are a lot more obvious to see than eggs, so add another 6 days to the whole deal before it is clear that there is a queen.

If you introduce a store-bought queen during the swarming queen-replacement process, the workers will most assuredly kill the high-dollar queen. So your situation (which is shared by all of us at some point) calls for patience. From your description, everything should be progressing as it should; wait it out and check again in a few weeks.

Randall

On 5/2/2015 6:36 PM, George Morris wrote:
Help/ advice!!!
We have 2 hive that both swarmed this spring, and unfortunately we did not catch the swarms.  But after we inspected the hives, we initially saw a queen in both hives.  Swarming happened over a week ago on both hives and we went into them today to look for the queens and or fresh eggs.  We saw neither.  The question is, are we early for seeing eggs laid by a new queen, even if we didn't see the queen, or should we be seeing signs of eggs at this stage.  Should we requeen, with purchased queens or give it some more time?

Any advice is good advice, and if someone has some time to come over and take a look, that would also be appriciated.  Our hives are located on the west side of Chapel Hill.

George
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