The story of the new queen

October 11, 2011

On this beautiful Thanksgiving weekend I decided that I should start to winterize the bees.  The forecast is for cooler days and the bees stop being interested in leaving the hive at 14 degrees centigrade.  For those of you that I have not bored with the details on what the bees do in the winter time, here it is.

As it gets cold the queen will be surrounded by all her workers.  The workers form a ball or cluster around her.  They whir their wings to keep the temperature at  the magic 22 degrees centigrade...just like they do in the summer to cool the hive.  As the bees on the outside of the cluster get too cold, they will exchange places with the bees on the inside of the cluster. The outside bees can access the honey that they have stored and will feed on it. When there is a prolonged spell of cold the cluster will get tighter and tighter.  The tighter the cluster gets the harder it is for the bees to access the honey so in extreme circumstances the bees can starve even though they are surrounded by food just because of not being able to move!  When the weather gets a little warmer the bees can move around more easily and feed on the stored honey.  The bees will also leave the hive when it gets a bit sunny and warm.  They leave on cleansing flights, which means they can go out to defecate.  They can hold it for a month if necessary!

It is really important that I leave enough stored honey for the bees to feed on for the winter...particularly for the beginning of spring when the queen starts laying eggs again and the larvae need feeding.  Lots of beekeepers feed sugar syrup in the spring to help them out but I am going to try to leave them enough honey to make it through...60-80 pounds.  That's the beauty of not being a farmer...it doesn't matter to me if I don't take every drop of honey to sell.

I went into the bees, partly to see if there was any honey that could be taken to extract, partly to take the screen from the bottom away and partly to see how the bees were faring.  There were so many bees, it was amazing.  I knew that I wouldn't be able to find the queen so Bill took pictures of every single frame in the bottom box for me to take a look at afterwards on the computer.

I definitely got both hives agitated by going through all the boxes...the air was buzzing with bees.  Bill got stung on his arm while taking pictures, so that's his first sting of the season.  We are pretty sure that Olive, the dog got stung too since she was busy snapping at them.  Wasps were around being end-of-season-stupid and I am pretty sure that there were some robbing bees coming around to see if they could score some easy honey.  I tried to work gently and quickly so that I could close them up but it still took a fair bit of time going through to the bottom.  I also know now why beekeepers always have bad backs!  You don't think about lifting with your legs when you are handling a 100 lb box of buzzing bees!

The deep box that is the brood chamber

Putting a super on top of the deep

 I think that I will going back into the hives in a while just to take off the 4th box from the top but for now, the bees are still working away.  After I finished working in both hives I came in to download the photos to see if I could find the queens as well as check for any diseases, mites etc.  Happily, I haven't found one mite in the hives and the bees seem to be very healthy.  While looking for the queen I came upon my first real bee mystery!

As I was searching for her majesty Queen Elizabeth I, I was looking for a brown queen...you may have seen her a few posts ago.  Imagine my surprise when I came upon a queen with a black abdomen and a white stripe at the bottom of the abdomen!  An entirely different queen!  I can only assume that when I was frantically keeping this hive from swarming back in June, I wasn't completely successful at eradicating all the queen cells.  One of them must have hatched and taken over the hive.  This might explain why the hive became more active throughout the summer.  If I take the advice of most beekeepers, I would try to replace this new, home grown queen with one from a queen breeder but I think that I will go with the instincts of my bees and see how they do.

New Queen Elizabeth I...she is centre left

I also found her majesty Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons and as far as I can tell, she has not changed so I will be going into next season with a 2 year old queen which apparently will have a very strong chance of survival and growth.  This will be interesting since I will be able to compare two very different hives next season if both hives make it through the winter.

Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons...centre left

Education moment:  The raising of queens is not a random act.   First, you need to know that all the female eggs that are laid by the queen are created equal until they are fed by the worker bees.  All female larvae are fed royal jelly for three days by the worker bees.  If they are then switched to pollen and honey diets they will become sterile worker bees.  If the worker bees decide that they would like to raise queens, they will make the cells of certain larvae larger and continue to feed these larvae with royal jelly.  This will change these larvae from sterile to fertile females.  These larvae then become queens.  They need a much larger cell because they are so much larger.  The workers will choose about 10-12 larvae to raise as queens...each a day apart in their growth so that they have a guaranteed queen if the first few don't work out.

What makes the workers decide to raise queens?  

There are two reasons for raising queens when there is already a queen in the hive.  The first reason is because the existing queen is getting ready to swarm.  These queen cells are called swarm cells and usually hang on the bottom of the frames.  Swarming is the only way a hive can pro-create.  Even though the queen is constantly laying and thousands of new bees are being born, this is not pro-creation.  You must imagine that the whole hive is one organism so to  pro-create, the hive must duplicate itself.  The queen must leave the hive with about 1/2 the bees to start another hive.  When the queen decides to leave, the workers who stay behind need a new queen and start raising them.  When the old queen leaves, the new queens hatch and the first one to hatch will quickly kill all the other queens in their cells.  She will then go out on maiden flights to be fertilized by drones.  When this is accomplished she comes back to the hive to begin laying eggs.  She will not stop laying or leave the hive until it is her turn to swarm.

The other reason for raising a queen is if there is an emergency such as the accidental loss of a queen or if the queen is showing signs of not being a successful egg layer.  These queen cells are often found in the middle of the frames and are called supersedure cells.  If one finds these, it's a sign that all is not right in the hive.  Beekeepers can get a new queen from a breeder at this point or let the hive go ahead and hope it all works out...like me. 

I'm not sure which happened with Queen Elizabeth I.  Guess we will know how successful she was next season...but I love the white stripe!