Notes on Royalty
Sunday April 1st 2012Replacing Queens:
I never enjoy requeening a Hive; it’s always bad news no matter how you cut it. Either you’ve lost your Queen or you are about to and usually by your own hand. To effectively requeen a colony with an existing queen already on the throne, you have to pull the entire Hive apart, hunt her down and extract her from her minions 24 hours before you introduce the new queen who comes like any Queen: caged with a candy stopper, attended by two to three worker bees, also caged. Waiting 24 hours between royalty allows the Hive to lose all sense of their former Queens pheromones and reduces the chances of what I would liken to a riot within the colony, generated by conflicting queen pheromones. This was the case with Hive #5 on the Alki outyard last Thursday, the Hive has been languishing severely and for weeks in my field book there are notes indicating the pattern of decline, suggestions to requeen etc. I put it off longer than I should have and in doing so risked the overwintering ability of the Hive, here we sit on the threshold of July and with only two real months of heavy pollen/nectar flows left, there is precious little time to rebuild and catch up for the new Queen of #5. The candy plug is called a quick release plug and via pheromone the colony is urged to chew through the plug and release the new Ruler who will slowly inspect her new digs on her way out the door for her mating flight. During this all important flight she will couple with as many drone bees as she can find, once finished she heads back down to the Hive, battling the ever lusty Stellers Jays and acrobatic Tanagers the whole way; if she survives the gauntlet then she will begin laying eggs in her new home and stay there for the rest of her life, provided she never swarms. I get really nervous about flying Queens on Alki, there’s a lot of habituated birds there who have figured out the tasty snack of a honeybee. A queen honeybee to a Jay is a N.Y.Strip to you or I: big time meal that heralds only the best of times. I would expect Monday the 27th to be the day she flies, wish her luck!
The other process of requeening is when a Hive experiences a swarm, when part of the colony decides to secede from the rest of the colony, leaving the Hive itself and taking the Queen with them. It’s little understood what makes this happen but what is glaringly obvious about the benefits of a swarm or split is how it propagates the species in general. Hive #6 had a small swarm already this year and as a result lost the original Queen. Where they went I do not know, somewhere on Alki is a now feral colony of Honeybees that were once Shipwreck. I hate losing bees but I love that there are more bees in the wild now than there were before so at the end of the day, it’s a win-win. Hive #6 is rebuilding the population to regain what they lost earlier this month which means they are making a new Queen on their own and I am letting them finish the job. Some beekeepers frown on wild Queens with an unknown lineage but I think it’s kind of cool having a wild Queen ruling the Hive. Bees will form as many as 8 Queens at the same time and the first to hatch from their cell will make an audible noise called “piping” to determine if there are any other Queen’s present. No Queen can resist replying to this sound if they are able so they pipe back, unwittingly letting loose their location, they are then hunted down and slain by the strongest Queen, in many cases, the one who hatched first. Visceral isn’t it? My Queens in #6 will hatch this week and once the arena has been cleared of competitors, the victor will rise to the heavens, mate with and consequently kill all the male bees Drones in the coupling process, that she can find before she too flies the gauntlet of predators back to her new kingdom.
Such is the story of Queen Bee’s. This Thursday night (last week) I held the Queen to be replaced in my hand and let her wander around my fingers and arms and was just in awe of Her. She is long, delicate and amazing in movement. I wondered what she was thinking as she wandered around in the ambient light of the evening shade, something she has never known before. I decided she knew something was up, she grew anxious as the minutes wore on….I took a broad mint leaf and rolled her in it gently, then swiftly dispatched her, laying the body in the spearmint crop. The process sucks but as I have said so many times to so many people, being a beekeeper requires a great deal of pragmatism and attention not just to detail but also and more importantly: the big picture. The beekeeper who is not willing to replace the Queens who cannot drive their Colonies populace and general welfare to a high degree is the beekeeper who will lose every bee in that Hive, come Winter. It is the cycle of Nature, this sort of thing.
That’s this week’s entry, thanks for reading, come back soon.
Daniel.
Comments
Charla - Tuesday, December 20, 2011 @ 1:41 AM
I feel saitsefid after reading that one.
backlink service - Sunday, August 14, 2011 @ 4:54 PM
Thought I would comment and say neat theme, did you make it for yourself? It's really awesome!
Kathy - Friday, July 29, 2011 @ 11:26 AM
There is a critical shortage of informative artliecs like this.
Justis - Thursday, July 28, 2011 @ 7:55 PM
IMHO you've got the right aneswr!