Interesting bee fact -

In a hive that has been queenless for a period of time (long enough that there’s no way they can raise a replacement queen), one or more workers may develop the ability to lay unfertilized eggs.

Due to how honeybee genetics work, those unfertilized eggs can hatch into drones (males), which may then have the opportunity to mate with queens from nearby colonies.

I guess this is sort of a last ditch effort to propagate the hive’s genetic material before it fizzles out and dies. Which I think is fascinating.

I don’t have an alternative program to suggest, but there are some workarounds for using redshift.

First, in the config file, you can set the location provider to manual, then specify a lat/lon and it will use that location in its time calculations. I do this on my laptop, and it works well except for when I cross multiple timezones - things are obviously off a bit.

Second, with the caveat that I haven’t tried this, it looks like you can also manually set dawn/dusk times in the config, which sounds like what you’re after.

See man 1 redshift for more info.