The Queen's not home, can I take a message?

The queen is often considered the ruler of the honeybee colony. With a title like "Queen," what else would you expect? In fact, the queen is the matriarch of the entire colony. She lays up to 2,000 eggs per day in the spring, summer and fall. Without the queen, the colony surely wouldn't survive. However, she is not the one who makes the decisions. The female worker bees truly determine the day to day operations inside the hive. For example, when a female reaches 12-18 days old, she secretes wax from glands from under her abdomen from which they create the comb used to store pollen, nectar and brood. The worker bees constructing the comb - comprised of thousands of hexagonal cells - decide the size of the cell and thereby determine whether the queen will lay a female worker or a male drone inside that cell. The queen measures the width of each cell with her antennae and, if it's 5.2 mm, will deposit a fertilized egg which becomes a female worker, and if the cell is 6.4 mm, the queen deposits an unfertilized egg which becomes a male drone. The drones? Well, they exist simply to mate and then they die. Without the drones, a colony could not pass on its genetics. A drone will emerge from its pupal stage, mature for about a week, then leave the hive for mating flights, where, once it mates with a queen, it's phallus is ripped out and the drone falls to the earth, dead. This integrated system of dependence does necessitate the presence of a queen honeybee.

A queen can be lost in several ways. For instance, a queen on a mating flight might not return - either due to inclement weather or being eaten by a bird. A beekeeper might also accidentally "roll" a queen when inspecting the hive while pulling a frame up and out of the hive, without noticing. It's possible that the colony rejects a queen because she is old and not laying properly, and balls her to death or exiles her from the hive. Alternatively, a portion of the colony might swarm with the queen and the remaining colony may not be able to produce a new queen. These are only a few ways a colony can become queenless.

In October, one of my colonies had a very high varroa mite population. Typically when we test a colony for mite levels, the threshold is 3 or 4, depending on the time of the season. Around mid-October 2024, the weather was still warm enough that I was able to work the hives, and when I tested the mite level on hive #3 going into winter, I counted 30 mites. I was able to knock down the mite level with an organic treatment called Formic Acid. Although the mite level was reduced to an "acceptable" level of 6, in assessing the hive in the spring, it became clear that the colony suffered from various ill effects transmitted from the varroa mites. Upon inspection in March 2025, I could see that the colony had absolutely no female worker brood at a time when a colony should be packed with them, building up a forage force for the oncoming springtime blooms. The frames were populated haphazardly with random drone brood - all males. Two possibilities came to mind - either this colony had a defective queen that was only capable of laying unfertilized eggs, or the queen died or disappeared early in the winter and the colony had developed "laying workers." A laying worker is a female worker bee that physiologically changes in the extended absence of a queen such that her ovaries develop and she starts laying eggs. Typically a very small portion of any colony will have laying workers - maybe 4% - but those eggs will typically be cannibalized. In the absence of a queen, the female workers detect no queen pheromone and they make a last-ditch effort to save the hive by laying eggs. Whereas a colony has typically one queen that lays eggs, a colony with laying workers will have a multitude of laying workers. Since the worker bees have a shorter abdomen than the queen, they can't lay their eggs at the bottom of the cell, and they eject many eggs at once. Having never mated, a laying worker lays only unfertilized eggs, which develop into drones.

As I pulled out another frame of bees, I noticed a few of the drones walking across the frame with shredded, desiccated wings. This is a telltale sign of DWV - deformed wing virus - a common illness caused by a large and prolonged mite infestation. In order to assess why this hive was unhealthy, I needed to look in the cells to determine if in fact there were any eggs. A queen will lay eggs right in the center bottom of the cell. A laying worker will lay multiple eggs in a cell, scattered along the side wall of a cell. Sure enough, each cell contained evidence of laying workers. Simply put: a colony with no queen produces laying workers, and laying workers produce a colony of drones, and is therefore destined to perish.

Hive #3 was removed, and some of the colony from hive #3, after being dumped into the field, seeks shelter on its neighboring hives. Perhaps they'll try to enter and become part of the neighboring colonies.

There are many ways to requeen a colony even when it is populated with laying workers, as long as the laying workers haven't been neglected for months. Unfortunately, in this case, hive #3 struggled through winter queenless and with an increasing population of laying workers. The only solution was to empty the colony into the field and remove its hive boxes. Some of them flew back to where their hive had been situated only to find no home. They will likely either succumb to predators or the weather, or drift into another hive. While drifting does increase the likelihood of passing on mite-born illnesses to an otherwise healthy neighboring colony, I can only hope that the high population of the healthy nearby colonies is enough to resist any possible transmissions. Had the laying workers only recently appeared, I could have saved the colony by introducing a new queen or a frame of female worker eggs from another hive, which would introduce egg pheromone and stave off the development of laying workers.

And that, my friends, is why hive #3 perished. This fate is more and more common in the world of honeybee management as beekeepers work to manage mite levels and ensure the health of their queen.