You’re a brand new beekeeper; you have taken a beekeeping course, bought bees, assembled your equipment, read the books, and chose the perfect hive location.
You follow the instructions perfectly on installing a package of bees into a new hive. But to your horror, your bees have left after only a couple of days. You walk out to see your honey bees only to find an empty beehive, and all the bees are gone.
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Why Is My Bee Hive Empty?
Just the idea of a swarm of bees makes you think of horror movies or maybe something that gives you the chills just thinking about
The reasons a package of honey bees will leave their new hive are different than when an established colony leaves. There are entirely different motivations for a package of bees to leave behind their new hive than when an established colony leaves their hive. Either way, an empty bee hive is discouraging and confusing.
Absconding is the term you see when a colony completely vacates their established hive, leaving behind honey, brood, and comb. For an established colony, leaving is not very common and is usually due to pests. Absconding bees will leave the hive for various reasons, but you have to do a little detective work to know why the entire colony left.
Another term for when bees leave is called a swarm, and this is when the hive divides, sending the old queen with half of the worker bees to start a new hive elsewhere. Swarming is how bees reproduce and is entirely normal. Neither of those terms applies to when a package of bees leaves.
Here is the short of it, your new bees didn’t like the home you chose for them. You dropped them into their new boxes, gave them sugar syrup, and the bees decided it wasn’t good enough. But know this, it’s not you, it’s them.
A bee package is not always the best option for starting a colony, but sometimes it is the only option. For example, if you were keeping bees in a top bar hive, these types of hives require the new colony to be started with a bee package.
The good news is that you are not alone. Package bees do not have a reason to stay in a new hive and are often willing to roll the dice and try and build a home somewhere else. Once a queen is released from her cage, the other bees decide if they will stay in your hive or go somewhere else.
An established colony with honey stores, brood, eggs, larva, and pollen stored will not leave their brood box because they don’t like it.
These bees leave the hive because of pressure from varroa mites, small hive beetles, wax moths, pesticides, or other pressure that will stress the bee colony.
Where Do Bee Go When They Abscond?
Honey bees abscond, leaving together and settling in a nearby tree or another object. Landing in a clump on a tree is just a temporary place for the colony to land where they look for a new place to live.
At this point, the colony is acting like a swarm of bees. More on that if you want to learn what happens when a colony swarms.
If you see them on a nearby tree, hanging in a large clump, it’s possible to get them to go back to the hive you wanted them to stay in. All is not lost, but it’s essential to act quickly so you can capture them before they move away for good.
You know your bees have left if you look in the hive, and you don’t see thousands of bees working on the frames, building comb, taking care of the eggs, and storing nectar. It’s common to see some bees back in the hive after the rest of the colony leaves.
This is because the colony left while these bees were out foraging. They came back to the colony, and they were gone. Those remaining bees in the hive box are not enough to start a new colony with.
It’s also easy to tell if the package was left by looking at the queen cage. They have left if the queen cage is empty and you don’t see her in the hive.
There are always a tiny number of dead bees in bee colonies, so just the presence of dead bees doesn’t mean the colony was poisoned or anything like that. A honey bee has a relatively short life span, so it is common to see dead bees inside and outside the hive.
How do I get bees back in my hive?
If you are fortunate enough to catch the package of bees before they leave for good, you can move them back into the hive. The bees didn’t like what you gave them in the first place, so you should take some extra precautions to make them stay. There are a few tricks you can use.
Place them back in the colony just before sunset. This gives the colony an entire evening to settle in the hive for a whole night before they can try to leave again.
Spray the inside of the colony with sugar water to get them to like it more. Spray the frames and inside of the box well to make them happy.
Use an additive in the sugar water to give the package a little extra boost. Complete and Honey Bee Healthy are both great additions to the syrup.
If the queen flew from the colony with the bees, she is likely very small. So adding a queen excluder under the bottom box and above the bottom board can help, but it isn’t full proof.
How Long Will The Bees Stay Before Leaving?
Typically, the worker bees are in the hive for a few days before the queen is released. In that short period, the worker bees are drawing comb using the sugar water for energy. The more drawn comb present in the hive, the more likely a package stays put.
So usually, if a package is going to altogether leave, they will do it in the first five days after installing the package. After the five days have passed, the likelihood of the package absconding is much less.
It is not that the bees don’t like the smell of the wood or that they sense the sugar water was artificial. Nor is it that they didn’t like the foundation or the paint fumes drove them off. The bees don’t want to stay because the boxes don’t smell like a beehive. It’s just too new.
The presence of wax, larvae/eggs, a laying queen, or brood pheromones (from the old comb) will tell the bees this is an excellent place to start living.
But new beekeepers have none of this or little access to it when starting a package. These are good things to add to the colony in preparation for adding a package. It’s too late now, but here is an excellent post on how to keep a package from leaving.
What Should I Do With An Empty Bee Hive?
At this point, you may feel like you are at a loss. Fortunately, you are likely in the middle of the prime bee season. You can either buy more bees (tip: buy a nuc, not a package), or you can try to catch a swarm. If you don’t know the difference, read here.
You can buy a swarm lure (the best swarm lure available, can almost guarantee results), which can be placed in your now empty hive to lure a swarm. Spring and summer are prime swarm seasons, so the odds of attracting a swarm with a lure are worth betting on.
There is no harm in leaving the old hive in the bee yard until you can figure out what to do next. You will see a few bees in the hive for a week, but these are the bees left from the package. There aren’t enough bees here to take care of a new queen, even if you gave them a new queen bee.
If you look at the frames inside the hive, they are likely just as new as when you bought them. The bees may have built some comb on the frames before your bees absconded, but there probably isn’t much. It can be left in the hive as there likely isn’t any honey or brood.
