It was time to go into Queen Elizabeth I and Hippolyta to check how they have dealt with the swarming. They both had capped brood which I assume was laid by the old queens before they took off with the very first swarms. The whole frame is covered in brood in a beautiful formation in both hives. Capped brood is larvae that has been fed and then capped with wax until it transforms into a full grown bee. The bee then gnaws its way out of the cell to start working.
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| Capped brood |
I went further down into Hippolyta searching for her majesty...a very difficult task usually but the number of bees is low and Bingo! There she is in all her glory...just starting to do her work. Hopefully she will start laying eggs and get the hive going again. Remember, 2,000 eggs a day!
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| Introducing Her Majesty Hippolyta II! |
Unfortunately, Queen Elizabeth I was not so successful. I was unable to find the queen in this hive but this is what I did find. In the second box I found a full frame of drone cells and nothing else. This means that there is no queen but a worker has taken it upon herself to fill the gap. The worker has become a laying bee but since she was never fertilized, can only lay sterile eggs. This leads to only drones being born. If this hive continued down this road it would eventually die since no female workers are being produced. Here is a picture of the drone brood frame.
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| Frame with drone brood |
I think that my next step will be to unite this box with Hippolyta and let the queen take over both hives. Hopefully the strength of Hippolyta along with the bees from Queen E will give me one strong hive. I am also trying to get all of my boxes to be shallows so when I unite these two hives, I will also be keeping the queen down in the bottom boxes with a queen excluder. When all of the brood finally emerges then I will take the two deep boxes off and cut them down. If I don't do this, I will be one of the many beekeepers with bad backs! The deeps full of bees and honey weigh 90 lbs! The shallows full of bees and honey weigh only (ONLY!?) 60 lbs. And...I will end up with 3 hives...downsizing already!
I also had put in the mite check boards slathered in vaseline in both QE and QH to see whether I had mites in these hives. The boards sit under a screen and when the bees groom they knock the mites down onto the boards and the mites will stick to the vaseline. Remember the hives have been weakened due to two successive swarms each. Varroa mites are not an indigenous pest and honey bees are not resistant to them. They attach themselves to the bee and then feed on them. A bad infestation of mites can kill a weak hive. The Varroa mite sneaks into a cell with a larvae before it gets capped and then proceeds to procreate in there while feeding on the larvae. The bee that comes from that larva will sometimes have deformed wings and I have seen evidence of that. Sadly, I have also found mites on both boards. If you have a strong stomach, you can look at the next picture of a Varroa mite, scourge of the honey bee.
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| Bleech! A Varroa mite...see the sucking pincers? |
You may remember that I do not use chemicals to treat my bees and I am not planning to start now. I know that the mites like the drone cells best since the drones are in the larvae state the longest. I will take that frame of drone brood in Queen E and happily freeze it! Ha Ha Ha Ha! I may also dust the bees with powdered sugar which helps them shake off the mites while grooming...and it tastes good too. I am in the process of switching all the frames to open without the plastic foundation so that the bees can choose the size cell they want which will help too. The bees will naturally choose to make a smaller cell size which the mites don't like. But mostly, I will let the bees fight it out with the mites and hope that if they win, they will become more naturally resistant. Much like the human problem with anti-biotics and super bugs, if the bees are chemically treated, they become weaker but the mites and viruses grow ever stronger. I am trusting in Darwin...hope he was right!
So wish these hives luck. Tomorrow I will write how the two swarms I caught are faring in their hives...and show you beautiful pictures of open frame comb.
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