> I am amazed at this.  How could a single bee, and especially a queen,
survive in a hive where
> the colony is long dead?  It is much too early for queen production and
swarming in my area,
> so she couldn't be a lost virgin (she certainly did not look like a
virgin, although she was
> obvioiusly not in laying condition).  Has anyone else ever seen anything
like this?

I have had a similar experience (only once I can recall).  Cleaning out a
dead hive and discovered a lone surviving queen who flew off from the frame
on which I found her.  I was amazed when I saw it happen, but never
mentioned it to anyone.  I do not know for certain how long the colony had
been dead.

SWAG: A hive needs a critical mass of bees to keep going.  When a hive
dwindles below its capability to maintain itself, the few remaining bees
eventually age and die, with no new bees emerging to replace them.  If you
come in right at the tail end of the demise, you might find the last few
surviving bees, perhaps even the last sole worker and the longer lived
queen.  That a queen cannot feed herself is a myth.  When there is no
retinue, a queen can and does feed herself.  I suspect what Ted witnessed,
and what I also witnessed was just the very end in a hive's demise.  The
queen lived on with no workers to incubate her eggs.

I currently have a dink that possibly has too small a population to incubate
brood sufficiently to survive.  The marked queen continues to lay a pattern
far too large for the remaining workers to incubate.  I suspect if I don't
intervene I will witness the SWAG I threw out in the previous paragraph.
The colony is in an out yard where I am not able to get to often enough to
closely follow what's going on.  Based on things Andy wrote, I suspect the
few remaining workers canabalize the eggs they are not able to cover.  I'm
left wondering if the queen continues to lay larger patterns than the
workers can incubate, and if the workers continue to canabalize those eggs,
and  at what point (as this hive continues to slide) will it finally
collapse, leaving only the queen surviving, until she too perishes.  I
suspect Ted happened in at his hive at the last comma in the previous
sentence.

Aaron Morris - thinking sad thoughts of a hive's demise.