During spring inspections my friend Brian noticed that this hive had a surprisingly large number of drones. So today we got in to take a look. Despite finding a queen, there was absolutely no worker brood present. There were four frames of drone brood. We had an unmated, drone-laying queen.
The queen we found was not the marked queen that Brian had in that hive during late fall. The colony must have superseded the queen when it was too late for a productive mating flight. If an unmated queen has the ability to lay eggs, she will lay unfertilized drone eggs. We saw no cells with multiple eggs (an indicator of drone-laying workers). She was also laying drones in worker cells, evident from the bullet shaped cappings on cells. Even the larva looked cramped.
The solution: We pulled a frame of fresh eggs from a separate healthy thriving colony and placed it in the middle of the brood nest of the struggling colony and Brian pinched the drone-laying queen. Amazingly there are still workers in this hive. These must be winter bees that are still holding out hope of requeening this hive. The frame we inserted from the healthy colony has some capped worker brood, so there will be some nurse bees hatching soon. Brian will go in again in 8 or 9 days to see if emergency queen cells were drawn out and capped.
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