Queen Life Spreadsheet
I went back through my bee log today from the past few years ( I have records back to the 90's) and tried to track down my queen record/lineage for my existing hives. Below is a screenshot of the spreadsheet, which shows when I found no queens (red "DQ"), and the length of life of each queen.
The dark green, for example, are the current living queens. Yellow is either when I introduced a new queen, a hive was a swarm, or I installed a new package. Dark grey just means that hive did not exist yet.
Most of these hives came from swarms in 2012 (I think prior to that I had only 3 hives)- and most of the queens are no more than a year old. One queen seems to be 3 years old- but I sort of question my records- I am not sure that I didn't miss something.
The record does not really trace a queen ( I could do that with color though)- for example, if a hive swarms, the old queen goes with that swarm, so some of the swarm queens could easily be more than a few years old. But I am not always positive about what the origins of the recent swarms have been.
One hive this year (actually last year, a month ago), lost its queen, but otherwise hives seem to be doing ok at the beginning of 2015. A few hives- judging from a quick review yesterday when it was warm- seem questionable- but its hard to tell for sure- they may just be strong deep in the hive. As always, the hives against my house seem weakest- I don't know why.
There is more of a story here than I can show- in terms of how often I found queen cells, often hatched, but then a few weeks later, no queen (suggesting I would think that a queen was lost in a mating flight?), and how often I just found no queen. I never have even removed a queen and replaced her- which is not a good thing- but per the record, they seem to be doing it themselves often enough.
Making this record is part of trying to understand if I have a queen loss problem- and I can see, that though I have had to add lots of queens, it's too hard to tell yet.
The dark green, for example, are the current living queens. Yellow is either when I introduced a new queen, a hive was a swarm, or I installed a new package. Dark grey just means that hive did not exist yet.
Most of these hives came from swarms in 2012 (I think prior to that I had only 3 hives)- and most of the queens are no more than a year old. One queen seems to be 3 years old- but I sort of question my records- I am not sure that I didn't miss something.
The record does not really trace a queen ( I could do that with color though)- for example, if a hive swarms, the old queen goes with that swarm, so some of the swarm queens could easily be more than a few years old. But I am not always positive about what the origins of the recent swarms have been.
One hive this year (actually last year, a month ago), lost its queen, but otherwise hives seem to be doing ok at the beginning of 2015. A few hives- judging from a quick review yesterday when it was warm- seem questionable- but its hard to tell for sure- they may just be strong deep in the hive. As always, the hives against my house seem weakest- I don't know why.
There is more of a story here than I can show- in terms of how often I found queen cells, often hatched, but then a few weeks later, no queen (suggesting I would think that a queen was lost in a mating flight?), and how often I just found no queen. I never have even removed a queen and replaced her- which is not a good thing- but per the record, they seem to be doing it themselves often enough.
Making this record is part of trying to understand if I have a queen loss problem- and I can see, that though I have had to add lots of queens, it's too hard to tell yet.
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