God save the Queen

So where did I leave off on our girls journey? Oh yeah I left you up on the hill wondering about the possibly missing queen. Well long story short... turns out she flew the coup. After eight days there was still no sign of eggs in the hive. The other two hives had brood (babies) at various stages. My bee supplier did not have queens in stock for another week. To top it off in three days we were leaving for vacation for a week so there was literally nothing I could do until I returned.

When we returned from vacation I inspected the hive. I was elated, I found capped brood and larvae! That means eggs were being laid. Well lets say I had a brief period of excitement. Until I realized it was not the kind of eggs I needed. It was all drone brood. What is drone brood? Drones are boys. When you have ALL boys that most likely means the female that is laying eggs is not fertile (has not been mated), and not a queen. It means one of the girls panicked and started to lay eggs. She is called a laying worker.

When you have a laying worker, the hive thinks it has a queen since there are eggs and brood. However a laying worker can only lay unfertilized male eggs. This means as time goes on there will be less and less females to do the work. (Boys do nothing in the hive but consume food and fly off to mate with queens from other colonies).

As I started to research this I found that it is really hard to correct this problem. Its impossible to identify which female bee from thousands of bees is the one that decided to lay eggs. So all the female workers look the same. How do you get rid of her to replace her with a new queen?

After much discussion and research I came up with a plan. When my new queen arrived I had to dump the entire hive out of its home about 50 feet away up the hill. The reason for this is that the laying worker would not be able to fly back to the hive. Her abdomen is swollen since she started to lay eggs and she would not be able to fly. The majority of the other bees would fly back home.

This hive was already weak from being almost a month with no queen. So once I removed every single bee, I brought back the box and switched places with one of the other hives. The foraging bees who were out in the fields collecting pollen and nectar would return to the place they left from and make the weak hive their new home. This would give my weak hive a boost while the new queen had time to get accepted.

A hive can only have one queen. They identify their queen by smell. This queen was brand new and they would not recognize her. Queen Athena needed to be released slowly or the hive would kill her. Her cage had a piece of fondant candy plugging the hole. This candy would take the bees 3-5 days to chew through to release her. In that time the hope is that they will become accustomed to her scent and accept her.

I checked at five days and surprisingly she was still in the cage. I waited one more week. When I returned I am happy to say I found her walking around a frame. She was out of her cage and was alive. All good news! So I removed the empty cage and closed up the hive. Letting her start her very important work of rebuilding the hive. She has a lot of work ahead of her, she is a month behind so hopefully she can build enough of a colony for winter. Only time will tell.


For now, that is the buzz... blessings!

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