Why Is My Queen Laying Less Now?

hey everybody this is david at barnyard bees what we got here is a little swarm that we caught a while back and it was very small and we're gonna go in it and look at it and see what we got see how it's looking um it's still propped up here on its ladder so let's see how it looks they're they're actually drawing out some comb there a little bit move that out of the way where i can work here okay there's an old frame that i stuck in that uh it was it actually had a little bit damage on it so i just cleaned it off good set it back in there and let them rebuild it very small very small swarm you can see where they're bringing in a little bit of nectar right there looks like an old queen cup right there let's see if we can find the queen and then we're going to talk about this a little bit i haven't used any smoke on them or anything so but they sure do got this propolize really good the lid was actually propolized usually small colonies there won't be a whole lot of propolis because they are so small okay a lot of not a lot a little bit of nectar right there on the top we're looking to see if we can find the queen none yet possibility there might not be a queen here so then we'll have to do something about that now being this late in the years it is it's actually today september uh third i believe would not advise any walkway splits or wouldn't advise putting a a frame with young brood because you're going to be so far behind doing that so if i don't find a queen which i'm not yet and i've not seen any eggs this little colony here has probably lost their queen get a little bit of sunlight there where i can see the if there's any eggs and i'm not seeing any not seeing any larva nothing but a little bit of honey so let's see move them out of the way there a little bit so definitely we're gonna have to add a queen to this one but what i was wanting to talk about today because i was counting on finding the queen in here and i didn't and there's obviously no sign of a queen you know like i've talked in previous videos uh you actually don't always have to find your queen if you can find proof that she's been there and that's with eggs larva something in there but there there's nothing in here but but uh nectar that's it no eggs no brood whatsoever uh well there's some there's some old capped brood right there so apparently they had a queen [Music] and they've lost it and that one queen cell that i saw it's possible they could have tried to attempt to we'll look at it again here i didn't look at it real close it's really very small and i don't even think that's a that looks more like a that's just a a queen cup it don't look like anything's hatched like a queen cell that you see normally that's been hatched out and if if it did it was very very small and wouldn't have been much of a queen so what i was going to talk about was what you need to do if you're looking through your colonies and you find out that your queen is not lying much what do you do or what causes it what causes your queen to lay less this time of year well there's there's a lot of reasons and stay tuned for our next video and i'll show you what you can do to boost up a smaller colony we'll get a queen in this one i don't know if we'll demonstrate on this one or if we'll pick another colony that has a smaller population but i'll show you what you can do because you're in september so you're losing days and you need to do something if you want these colonies to survive the winter this one right here is a pretty bad shape it's uh it's queenless it's it's got a handful of bees it's september 3rd uh it can be helped it's not a guarantee that it'll make it but but i'll show you what you can do on the next video to give them every chance that you possibly can to survive in a way to instantly boost up its population so stay tuned for next week and i'll show you that but but talk about this video why the quinn why the queen lays less every year when you get towards fall things change the daylight you lose daylight the days get shorter that's one thing that'll slow the queen down the nectar flow there's not much of a nectar flow that slows the queen down uh pollen coming in not enough pollen coming in that will slow your queen down some of those things you can do something about some of them you can't unlike chickens if you want to keep your chickens laying year round add artificial light early in the morning to give them an extra three four hours of daylight that's hard to do with honeybees you could light up your yard and they have nowhere to fly it's just i don't know if anyone's ever tried that before on a large large scale i've never tried it and i don't know i don't i wouldn't think it would work with bees you would have to have a pretty large greenhouse of some sort to keep them contained i don't know it would be you would have to have a big feeders inside the greenhouse and keep them contained to it actually got daylight outside where you could let them go out i don't know i don't know how that would work out i don't know if anyone's ever tried it if you ever heard anybody's tried it let me know i'd like to hear about it and uh and also while we're talking last week we talked about the the golden rod keep reporting to us keep commenting at how the golden rods join your area we do this to help the new beekeeper and other beekeepers and it gives them a chance to know what's going on out there so so please comment on that so what you can do of course you can feed one to one sugar and that will entice your queen to lay more as far as the daylight goes and then the temps are changing um all that is against you uh i would absolutely with it with a colony this small i know i'm a big advocate of feeding pollen externally in a feeder but in cases like this you better put your pollen patty in there a small pollen patty and keep an eye on it and it absolutely needs a reducer right here but you can tell robin's season's over because uh thank goodness gold draws here because this little hive right here would have probably done been robbed out and dead and i mean it's already in bad shape anyway because it's queenless so but next week stay tuned and i'm gonna show you what you can do to instantly and we'll demonstrate i'll do a live demonstration show you exactly what you can do to boost that colony up immediately to give the best chance it can possibly get going in to fall and into winter so stay tuned for that and that's about it for today i did see uh some bees there just bringing some pollen in there's one right here it shows up on video a little bit of light yellow to white pollen so don't forget folks barnyardbees.com if you need to be keeping supplies packages for next year uh barnyardbees.com don't forget help spread our videos it helps with the new beekeeper stay tuned next week and we'll show you what we can do to boost these colonies up and we'll get a queen in this one and and hope for the best and that's about it don't forget click on the little bell like and subscribe thanks for watching foreign bees

Channel: BARNYARD BEES

Views: 7,268

Rating: 4.9107141 out of 5

Keywords: Why Is My Queen Laying Less Now?, queen bee, mated queen, virgin queen, New queen, installing queen, Goldenrod, Goldenrod flow, winter preparation, nectar, nectar flow, feeding bees, feeding Honeybees, sugar water, ultra bee pollen, feeding pollen, fall nectar flow, fall honey flow, Goldenrod honey, Honeybees, David barnyard bees, barnyard bees, homestead Hacks, beekeeping, getting started in beekeeping, beekeeping 101, barnyard bees YouTube channel, bee man

Id: Un0iLHn942Q

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020