What a great club apiary day! Last year was our first for beekeeping and going to the club apiary days taught us so much, it was our version of having a mentor. This year the apiary has a new manager and different experienced beekeepers have come in to help. I didn't realize the difference having beekeepers with varied backgrounds could have. The previous manager, who was an amazing teacher, came from a commercial background, so a lot of his techniques came from the need to be fast, efficient, and keeping the bottom line in mind. All good things,, but they don't always apply to the average hobbyist. The beekeeper we had at the apiary today, to the best of my knowledge, has always been a hobbyist.
When presented with a hive where the queen had not laid one egg in the three weeks since the package had been installed, we (the members who attended) were given the option of combining it with another hive or adding eggs from another hive for the bees to raise another queen. We choose to see if the hive would raise it's own queen. The current queen was squished... the queen is dead, long live the queen... and we will meet back at the apiary next week to see if we have any queen cells, if we don't we may end up combining the hives, but it will be interesting to see if the bees can do it on their own. The most efficient way to handle it would be to purchased a new queen and place her in the hive, but since this bee yard is about learning we don't have to always do the efficient thing.
Having a queen not lay is all is an odd occurrence. If she has not had a successful mating flight, she will still lay, but the eggs will be unfertilized resulting in a hive full of drones. The speculation was that she had been damaged in some way or had some kind of a developmental issue.
We also learned how to get rid of all the drones from a colony using a queen excluder. One of the club hives had a laying worker, which has the same results as an unfertilized queen - drones. The hive was re-queened but it still had all those drones, eating up all the resources needed for raising new worker bees. I felt bad for them, being booted from the hive and all, but if the hive it to thrive and survive next winter it has to be done.
Last year we didn't miss any club apiary days from May until fall when we extracted honey, looks like this may be another good attendance year.
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