I had my first encounter with hives experiencing the effects of a dearth.

I monitored a mentees' inspecting their hives and the first obviously
swarmed and had both empty queen cells and a queen. But absolutely no brood
to speak of, just some capped but no larva or eggs. There were some drone
cells still capped but ready to emerge (lifted the lid on one and it came
out.)  My first thought was that she was fairly new and maybe had delays
that kept her from starting laying. It does happen.

The second hive had many full frames of capped brood, but no larva
anywhere.I was not sure what I was seeing in both hives, but it seemed
obvious that both queens had stopped laying recently. I told the beekeeper
that it might be a dearth, but I was not sure since I had never seen the
effects of one, and since we just had a soaking rain, check on them in a
week or more.

I got home and checked my weather records. For the month of May through
late June we had only 2" of rain. I posted my finding to two lists of our
State chapters so other would know what I observed and the same
observations came in from them- queen stopped laying.

What is interesting about dearths is I found nothing about them in any
books I own.

I figured that just feeding bees sugar syrup should take care of the
problem. but with two of my hives, one was fed to draw out comb in a deep
and the other was left alone because it already had drawn comb. In both, it
appeared that the queen had stopped laying.

So some questions-

1. What really prompts the queen to stop laying? It must come from the
workers, but how?
2. What prompts the renewal of laying?
3. Is there a delay after the first drenching rain until the renewal of
laying?
4. In my case, but it may be universal, why didn't sugar syrup promote the
continuance of laying but it appeared she stopped?

This sounds like the study of autumn bees and the signal to start laying
winter bees. In that case the trigger was a lack of nectar and pollen, but
with a dearth, which is also a lack of nectar and pollen, she stops. "It's
a puzzlement."

Bill Truesdell
Bath, Maine

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