[McBee7]

One of my packages installed this year went queenless (just gone) So we re-queened with a purchased queen, and the new queen once again went missing....Now there are no eggs or brood in the hive anymore, and maybe no nurse bees...My question is,,,Is this hive beyound re-queening? I'm not sure where the queens went and I'm content to "paper combine" this hive with another to make use of the bees remaining and hopefully some honey from a strengthend hive....
I might add that I had skunk problems earlier (had lol)...and that this hive, is the end hive in a row of 12, and even though it's been queenless, their #'s have actually grown because of drift....
...Any advise before I do the paper combine would be apreciated....:s

==McBee7==

 

[drlonzo]

Well this sounds vaguely familiar to me. lol.. I had sort of the same thing going on with one of my hives this year. Started with 10 packages and my #1 hive did basically the same thing. I couldn't figure out what was up with them. That was till I popped the top and pulled frames and found my problem was actually laying workers. The package was apparently made from a hive that was full of laying workers and the bees were loyal to them as the queen. So when the real queen came out, they balled and killed her. Did this twice before me catching on to what was happening. So at that point i did the only thing that really made sense to me. I shook out the hive and pulled brood and bees from the other hives one frame at a time and built a new hive that had plenty bees and brood to make a new queen on their own. Today she emerged and is a mighty nice looking queen. When I did this i placed the new hive right back in the same position as the old one so they would get all of the foragers back again. Foragers aren't layers from what i understand. In any case that's what I did and it worked. Check your hive and see if you have any DRONE brood or multiple eggs in cells.

 

[Slow Drone]

1 frame of eggs and larvae once a week for 3 weeks or if they start raising queen cells before that let them requeen themselves. Usually will right everything.