Queenless and Queenright

Beepeople:

Drama in the hives. Last post I was worrying about foulbrood. I had settled on the strategy (learned in the book "Natural Beekeeping") of housing the queen and her workers in an entirely new, clean hive and burning the old one.

Confirmed in this plan by my mentors, I set upon this daunting task. It involved: finding the queen and picking her up (that part gave me the willies), putting her in the new box, then brushing all bees off each frame into the new hive.  Lots of upset bees. Then hide all the brood and honey frames from the bees so they don't take the contagion with them, feed them sugar water, and scorch out the old boxes, etc.

I was rather depressed afterward. Even more depressed when I checked in the next day and the queen was gone!!  Anguish!  And only a handful of workers left.

Well good thing the hive next door (the blue hive, erstwhile Elizabeth) was fixing to swarm. Scads of workers, brood, too many drone cells, honey and - wait for it - about 10 swarm cells.  Bad beekeeper!  {Note to self - do NOT travel in March/April because the bees will get ahead of you!}. Elizabeth was busting out of the hive.

So I split the hive!  I had to read the "unusual situations and advanced techniques" sections of all my books! I felt quite the hive rock star.

I put all the frames with swarm cells into their own new fresh box, gave them honey frames, and tried to find the old queen to leave her in the old box with lots of new brood and honey space.

Except that I couldn't find her.

There are squillions of bees in a full hive. And they are all moving around so much.  And they rarely make that convenient circle around the queen all pointing at her like they do in the pictures. And she hadn't been marked {note to self: mark the dang queens}.

I shut the hives after exhaustive searching (with no veil and with magnifying glasses on; hello - bees in my hair). And prayed Elizabeth had not just got shut up in the tight new hive with all those restive swarm cells...

Upshot is: the bee goddess smiled on me. I checked in and the new hive still had swarm cells and the bees were tense when I opened them up. High pitched whining, frantic motion, many more guards buzzing my face - I had the distinct impression they were upset and wanted the top put on NOW. So I did.

Then I checked Elizabeth's hive and what a difference: calm, quiet, mellow bees. Happily socking away honey (a whole box in one week!). Happy making brood, no swarms cells. Amazing what a different feeling a queenless hive gives compared to a queenright hive.  I was moved by the experience. So I am waiting on the new queen to hatch!

Last thing - turns out the other hive did not have foulbrood. Something was way wrong with the brood - our state apiarist happened to be at our beekeepers club meeting last week but he said, no, not foulbood. But he took one of my brood frames to be analyzed in the lab.

Her Boadiceous Majesty Elizabeth II

We have a new queen!! One of the four queen cells in Elizabeth's hive that the girls raised hatched into a kick-ass new queenlet who knocked out her rivals and is now happily making babies! I looked for her (as noted a few weeks ago) and couldn't find her - but last Saturday there was lots of new capped and uncapped brood, so she's in business. I am so relieved.

For the sake of lineal clarity (I am making up all kinds of words today), we are keeping the names of each queen consistent (Elizabeth and Kathryn) but adding qualifiers (like I and II which are boring but useful) and in this case: Boadicea, becoz my girl had to battle 4 rivals in a truly bodacious fashion). Get it?

However (she said ominously), in neighboring Kathryn's hive I found two swarm cells! ARRGH! Kathryn has been powering along, raised a ton of brood, and packing away a lot of honey. I have 5 hive bodies on now which is a towering inferno of bees; my chin is level with the top box when I take off the roof.

So as I said, I checked everyone the day before leaving on vacation and there they were: swarm cells. darnitdarnitdarnit. I scraped off one and then stopped and thought: what the heck? So they swarm. This is a powerful hive, there is a lot of brood waiting and honey stored up, let them go. My efforts last time didn't do anything but make me queenless for a while, so ok then: build up the neighborhood bee population.

If I hadn't been leaving for vacation I would have pulled out the frames with queen cells on them and out them in their own hive box and started a new hive....just for fun. Next time.

When I get home I expect a quieter beeyard which will be a little sad but: go Kathryn !

Succession?

It's been a few weeks since my last post - my apologies, life is in fast-forward these days between the end of school, start of camp, bees, garden, bike riding and a new kitten (!!). But the bees have been busy.

First a "duh" moment I must own up to: it was not a new queen who left with a swarm of my bees but the old queen, the dowager Queen Mum, Elizabeth herself who abdicated! The bees raise queen cells (swarm cells) expecting the old queen to leave and a new queen to hatch and take charge. But as I had industriously scraped out and destroyed all the swarm cells, Elizabeth had no successor. She had plenty of regular capped brood and honey, but no open brood and no queen cells. A serious problem - we were queenless in that hive.

I remembered my bee mentor showing us how she allowed her bees to re-queen themselves: she took a few frames of uncapped brood from a strong hive and gave it to a queenless hive. The bees would feed a few larvae royal jelly and turn what would've been regular worker bees into new queens.

Having two hives allowed me to borrow a few frames of open brood and give them to Elizabeth's hive to raise a new queen. My lovely girls raised about 4 queen cells - and as of last weekend they had all hatched! Hatching multiple queens is common - if two hatch at one time they will battle to the death and the winner takes all. If one hatches before the others she will go around, find the other queen cells, and sting her unhatched rivals in their incubators. Gotta love the battle of the queens.

I haven't seen the newly crowned queen, but I believe she's regally marching around in there. New queens are very hard to spot, their abdomens do not swell until they have mated and are ripe with eggs (all my fellow moms will understand what that's all about: big pregnant belly).

What should her name be??

Missing: thousands of bees and an adventuresome new queen

I was told several times when starting this adventure that we are "bee-HAVERS" not "bee-KEEPERS."

Queen Elizabeth's hive swarmed yesterday and it was a magnificent (though exasperating) sight. I checked the hives for swarm cells as I described in my last 2 posts and was sure I didn't see any last Saturday, but Queen Bess and her ladies in waiting hid one from me.

I came home for lunch yesterday, checked the fish in the water barrel we keep for the bees (bees like rainwater and the fish eat the mosquito wigglers). Said hello to my brother in law, Charlie, who was working on our back deck, and went in for a sandwich. It was a gorgeous spring day, we've had heaps of rain and unusually cool weather lately, but yesterday was one of those crystalline May days when everything looks possible.

So must have thought the new queen, daughter of Queen Elizabeth, whom we will call "Mary Queen of Scots" for the historical Queen Eliz I's rival. I was inside eating my sandwich when Charlie yelled, "you'd better come out here- your bees are acting crazy."

I ran out and the air was literally full of bees, thousands of them careening around the yard in a chaotic vortex. They were marching out of the hive in a river flow and taking wing. If you looked up at the sky you could see them high up at tree top level, swirling. And the BUZZING - it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I stood in the middle of it and the feeling was electric.

In about 5 minutes they all balled together about 50 feet up in a tulip poplar tree - not a very easy spot from which to reclaim them as many beekeepers succeed in doing. The queen alights and waits, the other bees cluster around her and scouts go out to find another hive spot. They come back and dance their information to the group and somehow, mysteriously, they decide which place sounds best and they go.

When I got home from work yesterday evening they were gone. The hive still has a small crew of bees (how many I don't know. Why do some stay? How do they know who leaves?), plus Queen Elizabeth should still be there. I haven't checked yet.

I felt like I'd witnessed a birth. I was elated and exhausted all afternoon.

And while I am sad my work force took flight I am also thrilled that I got to witness it - and since the larger point of this for me is to increase the bee population, then things are good.

Smart bees

Checked the hives yesterday - no more swarm cells!  I was so proud. I had read in one of my favorite bee keeping books (by Sue Hubbell) that what she does to avert swarming is to reverse the box order. That is, take the bottom box and put it on top.  

I did that last week after noticing the babies had pretty much hatched out of the bottom box and that it was the top box that had swarm cells, presumably because Queen Elizabeth was feeling crowded. Putting the now mostly empty bottom box up top gave her wiggle room.  And since the queen seems to prefer to move upwards to lay eggs, she had a whole new box!

Strangely, I also put an entirely new box of frames with empty foundation on the very top of it all but the bees have drawn no comb at all in that - why not??

Swarm cells!

Opened my hives and found swarm cells! This means the hive is crowded and the bees are raising more queens in order to split the workforce and send out a new queen with a group of bees to start a new hive.

Needless to say, I am not, like most beekeepers, in support of this plan. I want my bees to stay home and make honey.

I had left my hives alone for about 2 weeks - one, it's been teeming with rain and also I wanted to let them get a good grip on their bee business.

{Note the pendulous, peanut shell-shaped queen swarm cells in the picture above. If they are at the bottom of the frame they are swarm cells; if they are in the middle of the frame they are "supersedure queens cells - those mean the bees don't like their old queen and are raising her replacement.}

One of my 2 queens (Elizabeth) originally started out with the majority of the packaged bees. It turns out she is very productive and over the past month has filled up two boxes full of brood and honey. When I opened her hive up I found 3 swarm cells! Yikes!

I removed them (and gave them to my son to take to science class) and gave her another box of frames for her workers to build comb in. Meanwhile my smaller hive (Kathryn's) had finally filled the first box so I gave her a second.

Here is the cool part: Since Elizabeth had too much brood and Kathryn not as much, I took two frames of brood from E. and put them in the new box for K. I smoked and brushed to get as many adult worker bees off as possible first (although I saw one death match afterward in the top feeder: bees will kill adults from another hive, but they will accept larvae and brood).

My bee mentor said this was all good - equalizing the population between hives is a good plan. But I needed to not overwhelm the weak hive with too many new babies to feed - moving capped brood, not open larvae (which needs feeding) was the thing to do (I think I did that).

Also now I have to assiduously check every week to make sure Elizabeth's workers are not continuing to raise more queens: once they start down that road it's hard to change their minds.

Then again, the bees are smarter than me. Who am I to try to change their minds??