Queen Bees

Why our Queens are Failing and What we Can Do About it

Queens. We covered some fundamentals about them in the last piece, what made them special and so on. I want to cover what a queen’s natural cycle is, and a bit about what we’ve been starting to see the past few decades around queen success rates, and how if we apply complex systems understanding and some of the stuff we talked about last piece regarding bee genetics, we can start to see a thread that’s worth unwinding. We talked about the special food queens get, and when they are young they go on a mating flight, mate with a bunch of drones, come home and start laying.

A queen will, in a natural system, survive about 3-6 years before being superseded, which, again, if you listened to the previous episodes we did, makes sense, given the wear and tear on the comb in the hives that thickens with each additional use. During those years, there will likely be annual swarms, meaning new queens would leave the hive to start a new hive with usually about less than half of the bees from the original hive. As they get older, they’re typically replaced towards the end of the summer run, in August or so for most of the temperate part of the world. If they’re going to fail, that is, they start laying more drones, it’s typically in the spring when production needs to ramp up and it fails.

A: Well, no, they didn’t die. But they’re gonna. Now today, I know this is going to be a shock, but basically none of those things are happening. Queens rarely survive more than 2 years, are failing throughout the year, being superceded throughout the year, and sometimes just simply going missing.

Right now, the mainstream arguments are that it’s because of aggressive bees, bad weather, and queens getting lost. Which, outside of the weather thing, nothing has changed. So what’s up?

Queens are born in supersedure cells, which are oversized cells, usually at the bottom of the comb, and many beekeepers recognize them because that might mean the hive is planning to swarm. Hives practice making these cells, too, which can make things even more confusing for a new beekeeper, but for our sake, we’ll focus on the ones that house queen larvae. 

What’s happening more and more frequently is that these supercedure cells are being built earlier and earlier with larvae sometimes even before the queen has started laying eggs for the new hive, and there are a number of instances of even having 3 queens in the same hive at once. It doesn’t make sense because the hive is weak in the spring and swarming early doesn’t make sense. Sometimes they even have 2 separate supercedure cells in the same season trying to swarm.

We talked about how if the wrong larvae are laid in a cell the worker bees will fix it, but if it keeps happening it occasionally gets missed, so if you start seeing drones in worker cells, which are generally in the middle of the comb, that’s a good sign something’s not right. During the summer brood production should be really strong, but if you’re not seeing much new brood that’s a sign the queen is weak. This is usually correlated with an irregular brood pattern, which makes sense given that they’re either dropping the wrong eggs or not dropping at all. And these queens generally don’t last much longer.

The problem that we were talking about earlier, the disappearing and failing queens, aren’t the ones who fail in the traditional way we covered, but literally go from being strong, healthy queens to disappearing in a short window. And that’s not all; typically the hive is designed to be ready to replace the queen as soon as possible. But with this specific example of queen loss, it’s about 50/50 that they even have the supercedure cells in place. So what is happening here? The short answer is we don’t have a clue, the long answer is we sort of do, though, but it’s not a simple solution.

So what do queens do? They lay eggs, of course, but also organize the colony; they help the worker bees know what to build so she can lay the eggs, right? And she does this with pheromones. So she can, in theory, release pheromones to stop queen cells from being built. But she obviously isn’t doing a good job of that. Well, why not? There could be a bunch of reasons; genetics, disease, poor mating, and even the conditions she was kept in when she was raised. Like any living thing, her conditions influence her ability to do what she needs to for her hive.

And much like other living things, we’re finding out the chemicals we’re dumping on hives for mites are also having significant effects on the reproductive capacity of drones and queens as well. A study in 2016 showed that drone sperm viability dropped almost in half after they had been exposed to chemical treatment.¹ Further, queens exposed to abnormally warm or cold conditions in shipment has also caused low sperm viability.² But the external factors aren’t the only players here in the health of a queen; the conditions which it is raised internally are significant.³ You’ve got 3 different conditions where we have queens raised, right? We’ve got swarming, which means is the natural split of a hive from growth, which is a good thing, right? It’s the natural cycle. The second is supercedure– when a queen needs to be replaced because of age or something. The third is the emergency replacement– the emergency replacement rarely yields healthy queens.

The emergency replacement is different from typical supercedure cells for a few reasons, the first being around the quality of sculpting. It’s really as simple as looking at it and wondering if it looks like a pile of mush or does it looks really defined. While the sculpting itself isn’t that important, it’s an indicator of care and quality towards having a healthier queen cell. But that’s not the only thing to be aware of, but also the size of the queen cell— the bigger, the healthier it is, the more eggs it can produce, the more sperm she can hold.⁴

So the natural thought would be to breed queens to be larger, right? We want to get healthy queens, but not necessarily bigger queens, which is where some of the research is going. The problem is, unfortunately, more complicated than that. In 1985, Dr. Alfred Dietz showed that honeybee colonies were more likely to accept bigger queens, meaning that by trying to choose smaller queens for smaller hives, you might not have any luck at all.⁵

Okay so if we can’t control the size of the queen, what can we control? We do have some interesting evidence about queen health in relation to other inputs, as we’ve already pointed out. For example, when worker bees are younger and healthier, they raise healthier— that is, bigger— queens.⁶ And those healthier, bigger queens tend to produce more worker bees that are healthier.⁷ And younger drones provide higher sperm counts for queens to keep hives healthier, longer.⁸ 

By 12 days old, drones are sexually mature and by 20 days old their sperm count and quality starts to drop.⁹ Now obviously, we cannot control individually which drones queens will mate with, but we do know that— generally speaking— most of their mating is with the strongest drones in a congregation. Further, it doesn’t appear that there’s conclusive evidence around when the best time for drones to be of highest quality, but ultimately the mating process points to the necessity to have multiple healthy hives in a region to produce high quality drones— which isn’t happening today.

What we can say is that mid-summer queens seem to not only carry the highest amount of sperm but also seem to be the biggest as well. I’d guess it’s because they’re eating a healthier diet. The takeaway here is that the chemicals we currently use are negatively impacting their health, the way we’re transporting them is impacting their health, and even their diets are impacting their health. Like all living creatures. So we know there are benefits to having healthier food, younger worker bees around the queen, younger drones, basically everyone should be younger and healthier.¹⁰ Even the younger the queen, the longer she continues laying eggs during the fall. One-year-old queens complete their fall egg laying an average of ten days later than two-year-olds, and twenty days later than three-year-olds.¹¹

I think for a lot of folks who are into beekeeping, queens are a thing that comes in a package and it’s basically like magic whether or not the queen is successful for the hive. And a lot of this, we still can’t really control, right? But there are some things we can control, including where we get our queens. As folks consider how they envision their beekeeping developing over generations, beginning to think about these bigger-picture decisions is incredibly important for the sustainability and success of their hives.

If you’ve enjoyed this piece, which is equal to a 8-page chapter, of (so far) a 766 page book with 407 sources, you can support our work in a number of ways. The first is by sharing this article with folks you think would find it interesting. Second, you can listen to the audio version of this episode, #141, of the Poor Proles Almanac wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to financially support the project, and get exclusive access to our limited paywalled content, you can become a paid subscriber on Substack or Patreon, which will both give you access to the paywalled content and in the case of Patreon, early access to the audio episodes as well.

1. Kairo, G., Provost, B., Tchamitchian, S., Ben Abdelkader, F., Bonnet, M., Cousin, M., Sénéchal, J., Benet, P., Kretzschmar, A., Belzunces, L. P., & Brunet, J.-L. (2016). Drone exposure to the systemic insecticide fipronil indirectly impairs queen reproductive potential. Scientific Reports, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep31904

2. Pettis, J. S., Rice, N., Joselow, K., vanEngelsdorp, D., & Chaimanee, V. (2016). Colony failure linked to low sperm viability in honey bee (apis mellifera) queens and an exploration of potential causative factors. PLOS ONE, 11(5). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0155833

3. Bieńkowska, M., Łoś, A., & Węgrzynowicz, P. (2020). Honey Bee Queen replacement: An analysis of changes in the preferences of Polish beekeepers through decades. Insects, 11(8), 544. https://doi.org/10.3390/insects11080544

4. Baer, B., Collins, J., Maalaps, K., & den Boer, S. P. (2016). Sperm use economy of Honeybee (apis mellifera) queens. Ecology and Evolution, 6(9), 2877–2885. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.2075

5. Patterson, Roger. “What’s Going Wrong with our Queens?” 2018 National Honey Show. https://www.youtu be.com/watch?v=2wrW_04iJ_c

6. https://extension.psu.edu/an-introduction-to-queen-honey-bee-development

7. Yu, L., He, X., Shi, X., Yan, W., & Wu, X. (2023). Honey bee maternal effects improve worker performance and reproductive ability in offspring. Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcell.2023.1156923

8. Sturup, M., Baer-Imhoof, B., Nash, D. R., Boomsma, J. J., & Baer, B. (2013). When every sperm counts: Factors affecting male fertility in the Honeybee Apis mellifera. Behavioral Ecology, 24(5), 1192–1198. https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/art049

9. Rangel, J., & Fisher, A. (2019). Factors affecting the reproductive health of honey bee (apis mellifera) drones—a review. Apidologie, 50(6), 759–778. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13592-019-00684-x

10. Wang, Y., Ma, L., Zhang, W., Cui, X., Wang, H., & Xu, B. (2016). Comparison of the nutrient composition of royal jelly and worker jelly of honey bees (Apis mellifera). Apidologie, 47(1), 48-56.

11. Lazutin, F. (2020). Keeping bees with a smile. New Society Publishers.