[Christi W.]

This morning we found our queen dying on the ground outside the hive. She didn't appear to be wounded, and even when we put her back on the hive's porch, the worker bees paid her no attention. We opened the hive and checked frame by frame, hoping she belonged to some other hive, but she was ours. (She was an Italian queen that we got in a package in late April.) We did see about a dozen queen cell starts that we didn't notice in our last inspection.

Has anyone else had this experience? Any idea what happened?

 

[Michael Bush]

Probably a virgin queen killed by another virgin queen...

 

[Christi W.]

No, she was our marked queen. She's been laying eggs and hatching brood for two months, and we didn't see any queen cells started until today.

Our hive hasn't grown as quickly as we'd anticipated, though. We're in Coastal California so thought the morning fog was keeping their numbers down.

I'd like to add that it's an honor to get a response from you. I bookmarked your website as a go-to reference and am a big fan.

 

[Richter1978]

Bush knows better than I, but I say supercedure.

 

[Michael Bush]

Supersedure or emergency are both possible. Queens can get pinched between the end bars very easily... I would say usually they aren't so quick to dispose of the old queen when they don't have the new ones very far along yet...