Options for drone laying queens

[Karin]

Advice please.
Some new beekeepers asked me to look at their colonies last week, as they thought they were queenless, which they weren't, both had eggs + larvae and one queen seen and marked. The other colony I tried to sieve the bees throught he QE to find her because they were super swarmy bees and they wanted to combine them. No queen found, but may have been operator error, as I just blocked the outside entrance of their WBC, forgetting that there is another entrance inside, so the DLQ might just have gone in that way (over the outside of the lift and in the entrance). Doh!

They have just rung to say that now it is clear that all the brood is drone in the hive where no queen was seen. I think it is DLQ rather than laying workers as all the eggs were at the bottom of cells and there was just one in each cell.

I have advised them to have another go at finding the queen, by pairing the frames and failing that, sieving the bees to find and kill the queen.

But what if she is a scrub queen and has a small thorax that will go through a QE? What are the options then please?

[Jimbo]

If the hive is very strong you could move it to one side to bleed off some of the bees. Put another brood box on the original site. Leave it for about half an hour before going through the frames.The flying bees will all go back to the original site leaving the gentle nurse bees and the queen if she is still there in the original brood box you moved. You could also use this with the pairing of the frames method

[Karin]

Thanks Jimbo. Good idea:) Since thre have been no new workers in it for quite a while I guess that on a sunny day, that would get a lot of the bees shifted.

[Adam]

Hi Karin,
I had a nuc with a suspected DLQ recently. The drone pattern was good - not all over the place and the eggs were at the bottom of the cells. I seived a colony and couldn't find her so I shook the bees in front of another colony in the evening and they walked in. Even if there was a small queen present she would have been elliminated by the recipient hive (not a hige one but 3 or 4 times bigger. I guess this will work for you unless the queenless colony could dominate the queenright one when combined.

Why would it be a scrub queen - was it one reared recently that's never been seen?

[gavin]

Is there any point in trying to put in a protected queen cell to see if they will supercede? While I'm spouting whacky and unrealistic ideas, would a frame of ripe Q cells (temporarily borrowed and placed in the hive for 10 min) induce the DLQ to start piping, making finding her easier? I recently put a frame with Q cells in a nuc after splitting a colony making swarming preparations. Within minutes there was piping, as the one virgin on the loose had settled in that box. Out came the frame.

That's the daft speculation out of my system for the day, other posts will be better, I promise.

G.

[Karin]

Not my bees, but one of my concerns was that they had already swarmed 2 or 3 times (beginners, so they weren't sure), and there were not that many bees in the box... so I wondered how good quality and queen would be....not so well fed, temperature and humidity not perfect, so possibly a scrub queen, either made from a larva that was too old or not properly nourished.

Adam,
Why would the recipient hive just let the bees walk in? Wouldn't they normally defend the entrance? Why did it work?