When a beehive loses its queen

In this little video, we follow our beekeeping sister in the process of importing a new queen to a hive that has lost its own queen because she has died and it is too late in the season to wait for another queen to hatch. Indeed, past a certain point in late summer/early autumn, there are no more drones (male bees) around that could fertilise a newly born queen, and if a queen remains unfertilised the whole beehive simply wouldn’t survive through the winter as she would lay only unfertilized eggs, which would develop into drones only, with no new female worker bees to replace those that die, leading to the hive’s eventual collapse.

One solution to prevent this is to import a queen that has been fertilised and introduce her into the hive in a gradual process to maximise the chances of her being accepted by the colony.