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.