As a rule,
all beekeepers are interested in diagnosing a condition in which there is no
queen in the family. We call this state - the queenlessness of the family. But
in fact, not everything is so simple. The fact is that in reality, under normal
conditions of life, a family of bees remains without a queen for no more than
half an hour or an hour. And only in the case when the queen dies during the
period of the absence of brood, usually after wintering, it is possible that in
the family can appear worker bees, laying unfertilized eggs.
At first,
we will consider the first option as the most characteristic and as the most
difficult to diagnose using acoustic control ...
For some
reasons, it seems to everyone that when we do not see a queen crawling over the
honeycombs and laying eggs, then the bee colony should be excited and the work
process in bee colony should be completely destroyed. But really it is not so.
Bees are in this state only for about the first half hour or hour after the
loss of the queen. They run around the hive and the landing board trying to
find her, after which powerful ventilation begins with Nasonov gland open. This
is the bees setting up a pheromone "beacon" that should help the
queen to find her hive if she is lost when returning from a nuptial flight. If
this does not help, then the bees move on to the next stage - the restoration
of the queen. We can observe and use this stage when dividing a family or
replacing a queen using our Apivox Smart Monitor. On the graph in the mode
Readiness to Accept New Queen, we can see how the open brood care signals
appear. These are the bees preparing open brood for laying queen cells. They
try to prepare all available brood for this. That is why the signal is so
strong. Apparently, at this moment they do not yet know which larvae will be
selected in order to become new queens. After a while, after about an hour and
a half, sometimes after two hours, the signal subsides. The bees chose the
larvae and laid the queen cells. The queenless state of the family is over.
There are future queens in the family.
Further, as
time passes, the signals associated with caring for open brood subside in the
bee colony, as the quantity of open brood
becomes less and less. The bees gradually seal the brood. The heating
signal usually remains approximately the same, because the total number of
brood does not change.
But there
is one small feature that can be noticed, especially at a time when the main
honey harvest has not yet begun. A stable ventilation signal appears in the
family, which can usually be observed during the honey collection. It looks
quite characteristic - in the form of a ladder rising from left to right. That
is, the peak of the signal is in the range of the most active ventilation. At
the same time, exists not very strong heating of the nest, and there is
practically no care for open brood. Approximately such a picture is kept until
the queen cells are sealed. After that, ventilation abruptly disappears, and
the picture becomes the most common without any characteristic signs of the
absence of the queen. Let's try to explain it.
We assume
that this picture has two components - firstly, the future queens apparently need
more air due to the powerful processes that take place during its formation and
the growth of the larvae, and secondly, the open brood that needs to be fed
almost completely disappears in the colony , and all brought nectar turns into
honey. This is what causes the appearance of ventilation very similar to
ventilation during honey collection. But when the first factor disappears, that
is, after sealing the queen cells, ventilation becomes less intense and stable.
The second variant - the presence in the family
of worker bees that lay unfertilized eggs, looks something like this ...
At first,
there is no open and sealed brood in the colony, so there are practically no
signals of heating and caring for open brood. The air supply to the nest area,
which is not present, also disappears. When some worker bees begin to lay
unfertilized eggs throughout the hive, while others begin to care for and feed
them, a signal of open brood care
appears. The amoumt of such brood is small compared to the usual state of a
normal family, but in the absence of other intensive works, the signal
manifests itself in the diagram. This signal is characterized by the fact that,
with its low strength, it is very stable and is visible day and night until the
family eventually dies.
Thus, we
can say that no specific or special signals associated with the absence of a
mature queen in the family were observed. This situation can only be indirectly
determined by the change in the general background of works in the bee colony.
