dead Queen in 3# package

[David Moore]

I received a 3# package yesterday and when I installed them I found that the queen was dead. I called the supplier and they sais they would ship another Q today. Will the workers abandon the hive or will they stay put a couple days?
Is there anything I can do to convince them to wait. I did put two frames of honey in the hive, also put some grass in the entrance.
Please give me some suggestions.
Thank you very much
DM

[Andrew Dewey]

Presuming you get the new queen to them within a few days they should be fine. A bit demoralized perhaps, but fine.

[Dan W]

Not to worry. The bees will not leave the hive any more than than would with a queen. Treat them as you would a package hive that has a good queen. Feed them sugar syrup and wait on the new queen to arrive. Hopefully she will arrive quickly. The suppliers are normally very good about shipping out an emergency queen. When the new queen arrives, waste no time in installing her. When installing her, poke a small hole in the candy in being careful not to poke the queen. They will be starving for a new queen and will be quick to accept her.

[George Fergusson]

I received a 3# package yesterday and when I installed them I found that the queen was dead. I called the supplier and they sais they would ship another Q today. Will the workers abandon the hive or will they stay put a couple days?
Is there anything I can do to convince them to wait. I did put two frames of honey in the hive, also put some grass in the entrance.
Please give me some suggestions.
Thank you very much
DM

All too often when a queen in a package arrives dead, it's because there is already a queen in the package- probably a virgin. They shake packages from booming hives, often on the verge of swarming. They dequeen the hive first, but sometimes there is a second queen in the hive, or one or more virgins may have emerged before or during shaking. It's not that uncommon.

It's also possible the caged queen just died. You kind of have to order another one, but it would be a good idea to look through the hive before you install the new queen to see if you can find one. If there is and she's a virgin, she could be a little hard to find.

I'd also go through a standard introduction- don't rush it. As much as these bees want a queen, and every queenless hive wants one, they won't automatically accept a strange queen and as usual, the longer the introduction takes, the more likely it is the bees will accept her.

Good luck.

[tecumseh]

well david not wanting to be PERFECTLY disagreeable this early in the morning I would state hands down that there are any number of incorrect statements here in regards to your question.

first someone sezs:
Presuming you get the new queen to them within a few days they should be fine.

tecumseh corrects:
unless you have somehow managed to keep the 3 pounds of bulk bees within it little container and quite magically plucked out the queen introduction cage without removing the feeder can it is my experiece that the bees from this dead queen package will drift over onto the hive next door with a live queen. matter of fact even though I am within a 45 minute drive of the weavers every time this has happened to me in the past the results have been the same in that there is almost nothing you can do to prevent this drifting. that is just my experience in regards to this problem.

then dan w adds:
Not to worry. The bees will not leave the hive any more than than would with a queen.

tecumseh adds:
I do not know where dan w got this idea, but it has NEVER worked for me. matter of fact this statement is simply wrong, wrong, wrong. anyone who believes that there is equal attraction between white boxes, one with a queen and the other without, certainly has a lot to learn in regards to keeping bees.

my other brother george sezs:
They shake packages from booming hives, often on the verge of swarming. They dequeen the hive first, but sometimes there is a second queen in the hive, or one or more virgins may have emerged before or during shaking. It's not that uncommon.

tecumseh replies:
when shaking bulk bees for packages no one I have ever known dequeens a hive first. practicality and time would never permit this kind of strategy. the idea of course is to use boomer hives, given the number of bees you desire to extract, and these bulk bees are sieved thru an empty hive body with a queen excluder attached to the bottom and into some form of screened box (we always called them shaker boxes) with a hinged door for filling the individual packages (typically set on some kind of inexpensive scale). the idea of the queen excluder is to sieve out queens and the majority of drones from the bulk bees used in the package. now I do reckon that a virgin queen might slide thru this excluder, but she is much more likely to fly given how the bees are banged*** around in this process.

*** we commonly called this process bumping bees although it was much more like slamming bees.

most of the time when I find a dead queen in a package I highly suspect that there was something wrong with this queen from the get go... it is simply that the baby nuc from which the queen was caught has not superseceded here yet. my advice to you is that I would ask the supplier to replace not only the queen but the package also.

[db_land]

This won't prevent all drifting, but will hold most of the bees - especially if there are some fresh eggs/larvae so they can start drawing queen cells. This would also tell you if there is/is'nt a virgin queen already on the throne.

[Tia]

That's what I would do.

[George Fergusson]

tecumseh slaps george up side the head with:

when shaking bulk bees for packages no one I have ever known dequeens a hive first.

I was misinformed! I was led to believe they "dequeened" them but I suppose driiving them down through and excluder effectively dequeens them but it's easy enough to see how an errant queen, virgin or otherwise, could make it into a package box with all that shaking going on.

So tell me, what do they do with all the de-queened and de-beed boomers?