The Webb's wrote:  "I have in spring killed queens in small over wintered nucs that seem to have lost their ability to lay an egg. Later I discovered that these queens were able to lay and produce healthy brood if young bees were added to the nuc. I then assumed that there was nothing wrong with the queen but it was the workers that were unable to produce the glandular food for her brood."
   
  I think what you got going is correct, that queens need the young bees.  Too often the queen gets blames, then you order a new queen only to have wasted the money, your time and energy, and the aging bees in the hive.  
   
  Having had the same problem, I also tried adding frames of sealed brood with the attached bees to dwindling colonies.  However, by the time the colony turned around, I had missed the honey flow.  Part of this is my fault as I keep thinking the queen is going to come around so I don't get the brood transferred until late spring.
   
  One way I've gotten around this problem is with my summer raised queens and fall splits.  Actually the splits are August and August in Missouri hardly qualifies as fall.  My goal is to raise my own queens, convert the mating nuc to a single, weed out the lesser quality, equalize colonies and combine the weak ones, then feed and treat going into winter including a protein/pollen supplement.  This produces a nice single, which is really a large nuc with an accepted queen ready to go.
   
  This also seems to work better with Italians.  I have some feral queens that shut down early in the fall, are slow to brood up in the spring, and carry a smaller cluster through the winter.  When the queen finally gets it in her head to lay eggs, she does so rather aggressively.  I've been impressed and pleasantly surprised, but also felt like those colonies were not going to do anything and pretty much counted them as a loss.
   
  My conclusion is that it's not just younger bees that's needed, you may also need a race of bees, like Italians, that carry brood much later in the fall and much earlier in the spring.
   
  I hope your bees are doing well,
   
  Grant
  Jackson, MO

       
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