{"id":193,"date":"2026-04-22T18:17:41","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T18:17:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hottsfieldhoney.co.uk\/?p=193"},"modified":"2026-04-22T18:33:51","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T18:33:51","slug":"queens-brood-and-nucs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hottsfieldhoney.co.uk\/?p=193","title":{"rendered":"Queens, Brood and Nucs."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In early April, while inspecting my hive, I found that two were now “broodless” – meaning that there were no young bees anywhere (in the form of eggs or larvae). It looked as if the queen had stopped laying for reasons unknown, most probably because she had died. As this was the first inspection since the winter – and bees live a bit longer over the winter, she could have died some time back. Without new bees, the hive will die out in a few weeks. So, to try and remedy the problem, I took some frames containing new eggs from two other hives and put them into the broodless ones. Bees will make new queens from eggs that are less that 3 days old if necessary. They do that by feeding the eggs with royal jelly for a longer than the normal period and then extending the cell to make extra-long “queen cells”. However checking the hive a couple of days later didn’t show the expected results – there was no sign of queen cells being produced in either hive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since I was going on holiday the next day, I closed up the hive and decided to revisit it later. Upon my return about 10 days later, inspection showed that one hive was still broodless – but the other now had a lot of eggs and larvae… so maybe there was a queen there all along (as it takes 19 days to raise a queen, and a lot longer than that for the queen to mature, mate and then lay eggs). Weird.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But unfortunately some of the other hives now had sealed<\/strong> queen cells, which meant that they were ready to swarm (actually, since the queen cells were sealed, it meant that they had already swarmed). A sealed queen cell is at least 9 days old — so I very probably missed them when I did my last inspection before my holiday. So… frames containing sealed queen cells were put into the (still) broodless hive – and some more frames with queen cells were put into a couple of nuc boxes (along with stores and some nurse bees) to try and form a couple of new colonies. I left a couple of queen cells in each hive (the books vary between leaving just one or two) and I’ll see how they are in a weeks’ time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One final thing – just before closing up one of the hives, I was destroying “surplus” queen cells – and thought I would have a look inside them first. Several were empty (?) but one had a live queen who promptly jumped out and scuttled away inside the hive. Oh err !<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’ll see how that goes !<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In early April, while inspecting my hive, I found that two were now “broodless” – meaning that there were no young bees anywhere (in the form of eggs or larvae). It looked as if the queen had stopped laying for reasons unknown, most probably because she had died. As this was the first inspection since […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apiary-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hottsfieldhoney.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hottsfieldhoney.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hottsfieldhoney.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hottsfieldhoney.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hottsfieldhoney.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=193"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/hottsfieldhoney.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204,"href":"https:\/\/hottsfieldhoney.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions\/204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hottsfieldhoney.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hottsfieldhoney.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hottsfieldhoney.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}