endless queen problems

[rober]

i'm just not having any luck with queens this year. 4 queens installed in splits failed, 3 swarms were queenless & 1 hive from last year went queenless. gave all queenless hives brood & they did make queens. also bought a 5th queen from david byrnes. i checked her & she was out & about in the hive. 10 days later she's nowheree to be found. another split with a failed installed queen made a queen. 10 days ago that hive was queenless again but had 6 queen cells. today there was brood & i found 2 queens on the same frame. caught 1 & caged her to install in another hive that had a queen 10 days ago but today she could not be found & there was no brood whatsoever in that hive. i'll give that hive some brood & eggs before i give them the new queen. i'm hoping to resolve this before it's too late in the season for the hives to build up to full strength before fall.

[FRAMEshift]

caught 1 & caged her to install in another hive that had a queen 10 days ago but today she could not be found & there was no brood whatsoever in that hive. i'll give that hive some brood & eggs before i give them the new queen.

I wouldn't let that queen sit around too long.  If she is not laying, her pheromone levels will be dropping and she will take more time to start laying again. If you have a good queen, why would you wait for the hive to start from eggs?

[rober]

there is no brood at all in the hive that i want to put her in. i was thinking that some eggs & brood would make the hive more receptive to the queen. i'm pretty sure she is a virgin queen. probably why there were 2 in the hive. there were 6 queen cells. if they are just now hatching there could be more.

[FRAMEshift]

A frame of eggs and broods never hurts.    And if you think they are about to go laying worker, that could make sense.  But if it's just a broodless hive, they would love to a queen, virgin or not.

[rober]

well they have a frame of brood & a shiny new queen. i'll check in a few days to see if she made it out of the cage. i used marshmallow for the candy plug. it's softer than the candy the suppliers use but it's really gooey

[Haddon]

I feel for you my second year I couldn't keep a hive alive queens died left and right I still dont know why. Your year sounds just like that year I had at least you have some good hives to steal from that year almost made me quit for good.

Last year I had a hive that just refused to build a queen gave them countless frames of eggs never started a single cell ended up combining them.
 

[rober]

 having some stronger hives to rob brood from did help. plus i have a friend who gave me some frames with queen cells. 1 frame had 16 queen cells. he's checking for more just in case