Hatchling

Even with a new queen on the way, my bees were in a bit of an emergency situation.  So, one day Wally and I decided to try to help them out.  Wally maintains Irvine's bee colonies and observation hive and I try to help him out when I can.  Out in the meadow, there is a top bar hive that had the potential to tremendously help my bees.

We went out to the top bar, opened it all up and started looking for some good brood comb.  It didn't take long to find a good piece that we were able to cut off an rubberband to one of my top bars (the top bars on Wally's hive are longer than mine and wouldn't fit in my hive).  With this new bit of ready-to-hatch brood and some nurse bees, the hope was they would boost my colony's population.

About a week later, I was finally able to look in to see if the new queen and brood had hatched.  They had!  It did not take long at all to see a virgin queen walking around on the comb.

Hatched queen cells (and brood) are on the white comb.  The brown comb is from the other hive.

There was, however, more bad news . . . the new bees had already exhausted the supply of honey the workers had been storing for the past couple weeks.  Following normal procedure, I made more sugar syrup to feed to the bees and placed it in the hive.  In order to try to guard against carpenter ants, I placed used coffee grounds, chili powder, and pepper around the base of the legs of the hive.

Even though there is a new queen, she is still a virgin.  In a day or so, she will take off on a mating flight.  This is where the spectacular courtship of the honeybee takes place, culminating in male genital explosion (literally).  The queen will fly up between 20 and 50 feet in the air where a "river" of drones are flying back and forth through the sky.  This is known as a drone congregation area (DCA) and could be as far as 1.5 miles away from the hive.  Drones are the male bees of a colony.

Now, the guy who discovered the elevation at which bees do the deed used an interesting trick.  He knew the whereabouts of a DCA and walked through it with a queen bee in a cage tied to a helium filled balloon.  He held the string at various lengths.  10' - no bees.  15' - no bees.  20' - THE BIRDS AND THE BEES!

Once a drone catches up with the queen, he will mate with her.  On occasion, the queen will mate with more than one drone, perhaps on several flights.  The goal of the drone is to pass on a massive amount of his genes and he has a trick to help ensure he gets more of his in the queen than any other drone.  During copulation, the drone will arch back sharply, snapping his genitalia and forcing his semen to explode into the queens body. 

The violence of the motion causes his genitals to snap off and remain in the queen.  As he falls down, down, down to the ground (or a burning ring of fire?) to his certain death having lost a large portion of his body, another drone will remove the old drones remains from the queen and mate with her himself.  Cool pictures of the process can be found here.

The Queen is Dead . . . Long Live the Queen!

Drama in the colony - the queen is dead . . .

I peeked into the hive late in the week and noticed a queen cup on one of the combs.  Bees normally build queen cups throughout the colony just in case they will need to raise a new queen.  The fact that they built this one so early in the life of the colony , however, had me worried.

A few days later, I did a more thorough inspection and my suspicions were unfortunately realized.  The queen and new eggs were nowhere to be seen.  This could mean one of two things:  she flew the coop with a swarm or she died.  A few signs point to the latter.

First, the bees built a queen cup to place an egg in.  This queen cup was a capped queen cell by the time I saw it the second time.  Second, there were about the same number of bees in the hive before and after the queen went missing.  Third, in addition to the queen cell, I saw several "emergency queen cells" made from what would have been horizontal cells where normal workers would be reared.  This suggests the queen suddenly went missing and the bees had to augment normal brood cells to accommodate a developing queen (this must be done within 4 hours of the queen dying).

The most common reason a queen dies, especially so quickly, is a clumsy beekeeper smooshing her when moving frames around.  I am fairly confident I did not do this since I am using a frameless hive, knew where she was, and have been supremely careful with my bees.  I suppose I could have done something else to harm her, but I prefer to think that something more dramatic occurred like an epic battle with a carpenter bee or that she valiantly fought off the carpenter ants as they tried to steal the young larva.

In any case, the queen cells mean I will hopefully have a new queen to replace the old one.  There is also a good amount of capped brood in the hive which means there will be some new bees to replace any that die in the next couple weeks.  While I was pretty bummed the day I found out I no longer had a queen, I am feeling a bit more optimistic now. 

A Visit from Catie

I wanted Catie to see my bees at work so we decided to go after church on Sunday.  The bees were still pretty busy building comb and fetching nectar and were not very aggressive.