How long should I give a vigin to start laying?

[scaie]

One if my hives has a virgin who has been hatched for about 5 weeks, she looks quite big now. The weather hasn't been bad so I think she's mated but still isn't laying. How long do I give her to start laying? Should I hedge my bets and put a frame of eggs in?

[Black Comb]

i've had a couple of big colonies this year that have taken 5 weeks from emergence to start laying.
I put frames of eggs into both and they started to lay.
whether the eggs induced them to lay or it was coincidence i will never know.
frame of eggs can do no harm IMO.

[scaie]

Hi Black Comb
That's what I was thinking, putting a frame of eggs wouldn't do any harm. Hopefully she's will start laying soon! Thanks for the advice:)

[Neils]

I agree with Black Comb. About 4-5 weeks is the point that I'd put a frame of eggs into a colony that I wasn't sure about and I've equally seen more than a few colonies with eggs in the week after. I do think that the brood pheromones can help "kick start" a new queen that is taking her time, at worst you get queen cells and know you need to do something.

[prakel]

I do think that the brood pheromones can help "kick start" a new queen that is taking her time

I wonder if any effect is actually on the workers rather than the queen directly? I've seen similar examples, and like Black Comb I've never really been 100% sure whether it's just coincidence or not but I have thought that there may well be something going on with the workers.

[Neils]

I'm certainly open to suggestion. What sort of worker influence are you thinking?

I don't think it's coincidence, I've seen it too many times now

[prakel]

Excuse any anthropomorphic content, it's just a lack of well defined thoughts at this stage -I understand what I'm thinking but finding it surprisingly hard to put into words!

I'm looking at this from the perspective that a colony can become 'lethargic', effectively loosing heart after being left brood-less for a while, now, it strikes me that there may be a component here that see's these disheartened bees effectively ignoring the newly mated queen. With the addition of brood the colony returns to a more stable 'right' condition -I wouldn't even be surprised if an empty comb from which the last of the brood has recently emerged had the same effect; closer to the state the colony should be in.

While there's doubtless a physical component in the queen's need to lay there's also the very real influence of the workers on her condition and laying (or not) rate. So, does the addition of the brood cause the workers to push the queen into laying? I think so, but as always, happy to see good research even if it means I'm wrong, again!

[Neils]

From a laymans perspective it seems a reasonable suggestion and I think it is often very easy to view the queen in isolation in these situations. We consider the colony when introducing queens in terms of accepting/rejecting the queen, but perhaps more readily in these sort of situations think along the lines of "when is the queen going to start laying?" Rather than perhaps a view of "when is this colony going to start behaving 'normally'?". I know I'm certainly guilty of that.

A frame of eggs is rarely just that rather a frame of brood that happens to have (a lot of) eggs and it does seem a reasonable assumption that the presence of brood and it's pheromones might play a role in kick starting not just the new queen, but the colony as a whole, back into a state where egg laying and brood rearing is normal again.

[Jon]

You sure the virgin is as old as 5 weeks?
Sometimes a virgin leaves with a small cast and the one which remains in the colony could have emerged maybe 10 days later.
Either way the sell by date is approaching if she does not start to lay soon.
Mine are averaging about 12 days and I have had some laying 8 days from emergence but they do mate a lot more quickly from apideas.

[Adam]

Queens do seem to start to lay quicker when mated from mini-nucs. (Which is the opposite of what is stated in Yates' study notes). Sometimes it can take a while in a big colony. However, 5 weeks is pushing it. I suspect that it takes while for the queen's "I'm mated and ready for action, feed me lots" pheromone to grow within her so mated queens are laying within just 3 days in a small stock.

Adding brood is no bad thing as it allows the bees to do something about a duff queen or no queen and will inhibit laying workers in the case that there's no queen. And LW's are just something to be avoided.

[Jon]

Yates study notes also state somewhere that a queen stops laying a day or two before a swarm leaves so if you see eggs the queen must still be present.
In my experience the queen never stops laying before a swarm emerges although they do slim her down and the egg laying rate is well reduced.
If you see a swarm emerge and check the hive you will always find some eggs in it. Sometimes lots of them.

[Trog]

Yates study notes also state somewhere that a queen stops laying a day or two before a swarm leaves so if you see eggs the queen must still be present.
In my experience the queen never stops laying before a swarm emerges although they do slim her down and the egg laying rate is well reduced.
If you see a swarm emerge and check the hive you will always find some eggs in it. Sometimes lots of them.

I agree. That's what seems to happen with ours, even though the books suggest otherwise. Now just need to decide which of the 3 hives my husband checked two days ago threw out the swarm we caught yesterday. Successfully put into cardboard box, bees happily fanning, coming and going ... then when he went to hive it in the evening it was gone. Hoping it was a mating swarm from the big colony we forced to requeen itself (queenie was laying far too many drones and the parent hive - same line - failed to supersede of its own accord last year, same problem, and died out) which stopped for a rest and has now returned home. Too wet to check today.

[Jon]

Could just have been a swarm which had no queen in it. The same has happened to me.
Years ago I remember I collected a swarm from on of my own hives in a skep and had it sitting for the stragglers to go in.
When I checked it an hour later it was empty. The bees did not take off to move elsewhere. They just drifted back to the hive of origin.
This is also what happens if a swarm comes out of a hive with a clipped queen. The swarm settles somewhere then drifts back over the next hour due to the lack of a queen.

[Trog]

Never heard of a swarm without a queen - just over-enthusiastic bees? None of our queens are clipped.

[HJBee]

Ok, I have a Nuc that the queen cell hatched around 26/6. Still no eggs & I saw the wee bisom tonight. Should I introduce eggs or be a little more patient?

[Julian]

I saw eggs for the first time today on a queen hatched on 21/6. No larva, just eggs and there was nothing last week.

[HJBee]

That gives me some hope but I am sure I've read if nothing within 4 weeks there may be an issue. She looked ok.

[lindsay s]

It's not unknown to wait for up to six weeks before a queen starts laying up here. As Black Comb says a frame with eggs will do no harm and it will give the colony a boost.

[mbc]

It's not unknown to wait for up to six weeks before a queen starts laying up here. As Black Comb says a frame with eggs will do no harm and it will give the colony a boost.

I sell queens and sometimes I end up talking myself out of the majority of sales as most inquiries are from beekeepers panicking a little after their swarmed hive takes a while to get their virgin mated and laying. My advice is always to try a test frame if they havent already done so, and by the lack of further desperate need of a queen from these previously desperate beekeepers I imagine the introduction of a test frame has prompted the virgin to get going, or nature has just taken its course.
If any of these beekeepers are just being tight and thinking they can get away with letting an emergency queen raised on the test frame head their colony then they deserve every queen problem they get in subsequent seasons!
Amazing how few get back to me, either for a queen when the test frame says "queenless", or a word of thanks for the advice as it turns out they didnt need to shell out forty quid on one of my precious queens after all.

[prakel]

If any of these beekeepers are just being tight and thinking they can get away with letting an emergency queen raised on the test frame head their colony then they deserve every queen problem they get in subsequent seasons!

There's some nonsense hitting the forums this year about "scientific" research which "proves" that emergency queens are as good as any well reared one. Personally I'm of the opinion that various people have misread/misunderstood the message, which originates in one of the Welsh Association publications because when I read it that's most certainly not the story that I got. In fact, the author cautions against such badly produced queens -but some people like to fit things to suit their own abilities.

[HJBee]

Well MBC I'm not being tight, I have a queen, she just ain't laying an I need to make sure she does soon or I will end up uniting with another colony rather than have a colony which size won't see it through winter, which is a missed opportunity!

[Julian]

I was under the impression that you could improve the standard of an emergency queen by knocking down sealed cells on day 4 (as long as you still have open emergency cells that is). This removes larva at 2 days and older that have been developed into emergency queens leaving queens raise from the eggs or 1 day larva, thus ensuring they had a "queen right" diet throughout development. Am I mistaken?

[prakel]

Just my thoughts here. It's not just the age of the larvae that they start with although that's obviously important, it's also the condition of the nurse bees and the over-all state of the colony. There's no denying that quite good queens can come from emergency cells which are built by stable, healthy colonies but you also get some right dross. It makes no sense to me to use anything less than the best available queen.

To add some flesh to my thoughts on emergency queens, I've done a lot of walk away splits over the years when I needed to spend a lot of time away and couldn't be tied to a queen rearing timetable. The method works really well as a way of increasing colony numbers but is totally inefficient as a method of queen rearing not only because we're tying up huge resources for small returns but because in my experience (and yes, it took me a fair while to put all the bits together) the amazing queen which heads the colony in the following season is quite often actually an early supercedure daughter of the initial emergency queen which has acted as a stop-gap to keep the split going. I reckon this is more usual than generally acknowledged by the walk-away gurus; a phenomena which is probably masked to a great extent by the kind of blind management which can often go hand-in-hand with the method.

[Julian]

Thanks prakel for pointing out the realistic field conditions. I imagine these elements are often overlooked when thinking of supercedure and emergency queens.

When raising queens in your own time the focus is on raising the best that you can by creating the ideal condition in terms of colony, eggs and resources. Things are (generally) under your control with minimal risk. With supercedure and emergency queens I guess the risk of loosing the colony shifts the focus slightly and the priority changes to having a functioning queen rather than the best that you can, even if this leads to supercedure later on.

[prakel]

I guess the risk of loosing the colony shifts the focus slightly and the priority changes to having a functioning queen rather than the best that you can, even if this leads to supercedure later on.

This continues to be my recurring observation, not claiming it's a 100% rule because it's not but I reckon that it's not at all unusual. I've definitely seen some amazing queens reared off eggs laid by emergency queens comparatively soon after they themselves have started to lay -but interestingly it's something which I've only noticed since I've been in the position to make regular checks on the splits, back in the days when they were left to sort themselves out and build up for winter while I was a long way away it never happened! Back then, the emergency queens always seemed to do well...

[Jon]

I suspect you are right prakel. You need the time to observe bees properly and work out what is going on. The same happens re. mating swarms. People say they don't occur but I see them on a regular basis because I spend a lot of time with my bees and I work with a lot of apideas so queens are flying and mating at my apiaries almost every day.
If you don't mark or clip queens you have no way of knowing for sure if the queen you see in the spring is the same one you last saw in September.
To get back to the original post, I would definitely be worried about how long the queen is taking to mate.
My apidea queens are mating in 10-12 days from emergence and very few are taking more than 2 weeks to start laying.
A colony where I saw a virgin emerge has eggs 13 days later.
3 nucs I made up with grafted queen cells all had a laying queen within 2 weeks of queen emergence.
This is the best year I remember for queen mating but maybe conditions are not so good further north in Aberdeen.

[HJBee]

To get back to the original post, I would definitely be worried about how long the queen is taking to mate.
My apidea queens are mating in 10-12 days from emergence and very few are taking more than 2 weeks to start laying..

I'm giving her a week, then I will try eggs to kick start. After that it's either see if you have any queens left or unite with parent colony.

[Little_John]

I recently observed 5 weeks from virgin emergence to first laying, but that was following a test-frame introduction into a long-term dysfunctional colony (1), which I suspect may have had some bearing on the queen's behaviour.

LJ

(1) In future such colonies will not be tolerated. :)

[mbc]

Well MBC I'm not being tight, I have a queen, she just ain't laying an I need to make sure she does soon or I will end up uniting with another colony rather than have a colony which size won't see it through winter, which is a missed opportunity!

I wasnt implying you were being tight HJBee, rather pointing out that, at least in my area, there are knowledge gaps and misconceptions regarding the use of test frames. To my mind, a colony queenless long enough to cause concern should not be allowed to raise its own queen due to the timing of when new bees could potentially emerge (given that everything works out and a new queen gets mated) being so far ahead that the balance of the colony will be severely challenged to the extent that winter survival chances are damaged.
I recently read of worker bees being a fungible commodity and the thought made me shudder eg. a batch of new bees from a well balanced colony with good nutrition will be much more robust than new bees emerging from a recovering colony raised by older bees with hypopharyngeal glands kickstarted after atrophy. I believe it takes at least two generations to get back to robust bees of suitable quality to carry a colony through the winter months and have enough left in the tank to raise a successfull generation of brood the following spring.

[nemphlar]

It would be a pity if anyone starting to produce the odd queen were put off emergency queens, Julian is right a perfectly acceptable queen can be had by checking removing the 4 day sealed cells in reasonably sized colony. I've occasionally used these successfully and no they weren't superseded. To be honest I can only remember a true supersedure towards the end of the season, a large colony would almost invariably swarm in the middle of the year from the bees point of view that's success.
This is the first year for a long time I've been forced to let VQ mate from large colonies and they almost always mess about for weeks 4 or5 An apidea or nuc is the way to go normally job done in a fortnight