August 8th, 2024
Hello everyone! It's been such a busy summer that I've barely had time to write at all. I feel like I say that every time but it's true.
My lack of writing does not mean there has been any lack of drama though. So much has happened. Back in June one of our hives suddenly stopped producing eggs and we (Mason) sprang into action to save the weakened hive.
To keep the hives straight we have named the northern hive London and the southern hive Paris. Back in May we added a medium-sized box on top of the bottom box to give the bees space to expand. It seems that neither hive liked these boxes much but we aren't exactly sure why. The frames were clean and ready to draw comb on. Sometimes colonies can just be “picky” but it seems we may have gotten two at once. The other problem is that despite our best efforts, we think there are not enough flowers in the nearby area in the late spring. This means the bees were mostly relying on us to feed them sugar water so that they have the resources to draw new honeycomb. We think these factors may have combined to make the bees in the Paris hive pretty unhappy, but we aren’t sure if the old queen died or left.
Up to this point, we had not seen either of the queens themselves in person, but were able to at least look for for evidence she had been there recently. The telltale signs are fresh eggs and larvae. If there are eggs that means that the queen has been in the hive in the last three days. If there are larvae, that means she has been there in at least the last seven days. You want to see a mix of both, with eggs being the best sign. When we found the queen missing, the hive did not have fresh eggs but did have some capped brood so we knew she'd been gone at least nine days (workers are capped around the ninth day). Because there were no eggs present, the workers did not have a way to raise a new queen, and without intervention would become “hoplessly queenless” - workers begin laying eggs (only drones, since they are unable to go out and mate), in an evolutionary last-ditch effort to spread the colony’s genetics to others.
It was time for the trusty beekeeper to jump into action. While Paris had been in a dire state, London was doing quite well. Mason was able to take one frame filled with eggs and transfer it from London to Paris. The bees in the Paris hive will raise them as their own and keep their population up while they raised a new queen. They chose 4-5 larvae from the new frame of eggs to turn into queens.
The life cycle of a queen bee is pretty complex and this is a great article that explains it all with pictures and videos!
The Queen Bee: her birth, life and death (geesbees.ca)
The long and short of it is that it takes 15 days for a queen to hatch, then she has to go on a mating flight, return and begin laying eggs. That's a long time to not be raising any new bees!
We checked on the bees a week or so later and found a new queen had hatched! We could tell because the queen cells had already been removed and repurposed, indicating the colony had accepted their new leader. Around then she would have killed the other competing queens and gone out on her mating flight. She must have been successful, because the next time we checked the queen had returned and started laying eggs! The Paris hive had been successfully saved through careful hive management by our beekeeper.
Yesterday, we went and checked on the bees again and Paris is thriving! They've started drawing comb out of the medium sized box and are moving up into it. Meanwhile, the queen had been busy laying a very strong brood pattern.
London however, is a little bit anemic. They still don't really like the medium box and their colony seemed smaller, but not so small as to suggest a swarm had happened. Mason did spot the queen though, and managed to catch her on video! He also saw that she was still laying eggs, even if the colony is a bit undersized. We think that she may be running out of room to lay eggs and this is causing her to slow her pace. She needs to catch up to her expat daughter! We're going to trade out the medium box for a large box we have sitting in our backyard.
Speaking of the large box in our backyard. This box is from last season and contained honey, wax and lots of mold from sitting out over the winter, since we didn’t have a garage to keep it in at the time. When it sat on the front porch of our last house, it was undisturbed for months. We moved to a new house in May and a bunch of local, potentially wild, honey bees found the box and started raiding it! We had so many bees on our porch we had to be careful letting our dogs out. Now all the honey in wax is mostly gone and all sorts of no-goods have taken up residence such as wasps, yellow jackets, ants, earwigs, and wax moths. We will have to shake it out pretty good to get rid of any bugs left before we take it to our hives. Mason says it might even be beyond saving, and we may end up putting a fresh, undrawn box on top instead. Better to give them a clean slate with extra work, than risk them rejecting the yucky box or accidentally introducing pests into an already weakened hive.
This summer has been so eventful and I'm so proud of my beekeeper’s attention to the hives and skillful management. Hopefully these bees learn to like their upper boxes and have a strong end of season.
