Before doing anything, work out which of three situations you're in: she needs more time, she's failed, or the colony is queenless. The fixes are completely different, and acting on the wrong diagnosis wastes the one thing a northern colony can't spare, which is season.
How long should I wait before worrying?
A package queen released at day three should be laying by day seven to ten. A nuc queen should already be laying on arrival.
A queen from a supersedure or a swarm, or one you introduced later, can take longer — she has to mate and mature. Three weeks from emergence to laying is normal and people panic at two.
What are the signs she's still there but slow?
Calm colony, bees working normally, comb being drawn, no queen cells. A colony that has a queen behaves like it has a queen even before she lays — it's organised and unhurried.
Give her another week before intervening.
What does a queenless colony look like?
Loud, restless, and irritable. There's a particular sound — a rising roar when you open up rather than a settled hum — that experienced beekeepers recognise before they see anything.
Then look for emergency queen cells: peanut-shaped cells hanging off the face of the comb. If the bees are building those, they know they're queenless and they're solving it.
What about multiple eggs per cell?
That's a laying worker, and it means the colony has been queenless long enough that a worker's ovaries developed. Eggs will be scattered, several per cell, often stuck to cell walls rather than standing at the bottom.
This is the hardest one to fix. A laying-worker colony will usually kill an introduced queen. The most reliable answer is to combine the colony with a strong queenright one using the newspaper method, and accept you've lost that colony as a separate unit.
Should I let them raise their own queen?
In the northern plains, think carefully about timing. A colony raising its own queen loses roughly a month between the old queen stopping and the new one laying — emergence, mating flights, maturation. In May you can afford that. By July you usually can't.
If it's early and the colony is strong, letting them requeen themselves produces a locally mated queen and costs you nothing. If it's late, buy a mated queen and requeen directly.
When should I just buy a queen?
When the season is short, the colony is weak, or you need brood now. A mated queen introduced properly is laying within a week, which in a short season is worth far more than the price of the queen.
Questions about any of this? Call or text us at (701) 809-0153. We're always happy to help, even if you didn't get your bees from us.