Queenless Agitation and Queenlessness
Krankheiten
Queenless roar describes the behavior of a colony that has lost its queen or no longer perceives her as adequate.
Queenless roar describes the behavior of a colony that has lost its queen or no longer perceives her as adequate. Causes include loss of the queen during an inspection, a failed mating, a swarm, the queen's age, or injury during requeening. Because the scent given off by the queen is missing, the colony loses its order.
When the hive is opened, the sound is the first thing you notice. Instead of the calm hum, the bees roar loudly and do not settle again; the sound seems plaintive and agitated. The bees run restlessly over the combs, and the colony often reacts more defensively than usual. The decisive finding, however, is a look into the brood nest: no eggs, no youngest larvae, but possibly emergency queen cells on open larvae. If the condition lasts for a long time, drone brood in worker cells from laying workers follows.
A test comb provides certainty. For this, an open brood comb with eggs and the youngest larvae from a healthy colony is hung into the colony. After about three to four days it is checked: if the colony has started emergency queen cells, it was queenless. If the comb remains unchanged, a queen is present, possibly one that has simply not started laying yet. Patience is important, because after a swarm or a requeening a young queen needs several weeks to start laying, and during this time a test comb is easily misinterpreted.
Several remedies are available: introducing a mated queen in an introduction cage after all emergency queen cells have been broken out, leaving one good emergency queen cell and breaking the rest, or uniting the colony with a queenright colony. In late summer and autumn, uniting is usually the better decision, because a new mating then hardly succeeds and the colony would otherwise end up as a winter loss. Small, healthy queenless units can also be shaken off and distributed among other colonies.
Hectic action is to be avoided. Frequent opening and searching increases the unrest and costs time and warmth. Nor does it make sense to introduce an expensive queen into a supposedly queenless colony without a test comb first, because if a queen is present after all, the introduced one will be stung to death.