The Queen is dead, long live the queen!
The old queen dies (naturally or in some cases ‘otherwise’) and the new queen begins her reign.
Just like in our society one member of the ruling family dies and another takes its place, however in my case there’s no state funeral or day of mourning.
So why would I kill an existing queen, after all I’ve already mentioned in previous articles that the queen is central to the colony and without it the colony is retarded in its ability to perform normally?
As with humans some people get old gracefully whilst others try to maintain the rock and roll life style of their youth (and buy a Harley or a sports car), with bees it’s the same.
However with bees we actually want the rock and roll life style, not the ‘sits next to the fire knitting’ thing.
You may wonder why this is, it after all contrary to the natural way of things.
A queen bee will live for up to three years, throughout this period she will spend the first few weeks exploring and getting pregnant – then she’ll spend the rest her life laying eggs and unless she swarms she’ll never leave the hive again.
Consider her three years in human terms, 0-33, 34-66, 67-99 years old.
In her first year she will perform admirably, she’ll lay thousands of eggs and the colony will be strong.
In her second year she might still be going strong, laying thousands of eggs, but there might also be inconsistencies amongst her habits or the colonies behaviour. For example she may create more drones (males) then are required, her laying may be slow to start in the year or perhaps she doesn’t lay enough eggs to really get the colony up to strength. We might also expect to see the colony becoming more aggressive in general. We might also see that certain problems that effect bees are present, even in small amounts.
In her third year we are undoubtedly going to see that the colony behaving in a more aggressive manner, the number of drones will increase and her laying will be both restricted and not in large clumps in the hive. We will probably also see that disease has an easier route into the hive or has affected the queen directly (as we get older our ability to fight of a cold becomes reduced).
For reference the hive becomes more aggressive when it is either under attack, struggling to find food or the queen is weak – in all three cases we can summarise as ‘something isn’t right’
When we see a queen that is producing a lot more drones than we would expect to see it’s typically because the queen has run out of sperm (she stores it from her mating flight and uses it as required) – so un fertilised eggs become male, fertilised become female.
So How do I rectify these problems?
Simply put I change the queen.
This can be done in one of two ways, naturally or ‘with help’.
The naturally option involves removing the queen and letting the colony make its own new queen. In order for this to work there needs to be some eggs in the hive which are only 3 or 4 days old – anything older and they’re of no use for this task.
The ‘with help’ method involves me finding someone who breeds queens and then introducing a new queen to the colony – typically a queen that has already done her mating flight and so is ready to go.
There are a couple of advantages to this method, the first is that you don’t need to wait a month (the colony needs to grow a new queen – 2 weeks, then she needs another 2 weeks before she’s ready to work). The queen is shown below (she has the green dot).
Secondly, when you buy a queen from a queen breeder there’s a lot less chance of getting a queen that has been impregnated by ‘wild’ bees, typically a queen breeder can tell you what line of bees has been used from both male and female side. To give you an example I went down to Sion at the weekend to get a few new queens and know that the mother of my queen was artificially inseminated with a german bees sperm (same race) and was especially crossed for traits that we want (gentle, disease resistant, etc).
I’ll spend some time in another article explaining how the queen breeding process works and how seriously it’s taken here in Switzerland.
Now I’ve got a new Queen how do I use it?
One might assume that a bee is a bee is a bee and so just open the box and drop it in – nope!
If you do it this way they will simply fly out or be kicked out by the colony.
The colony will have the scent of the old queen (pheromones), they are spread throughout the hive and each of the bees knows this smell and associates with it – when the queen is weak or gone this pheromone either reduces or disappears (which is what prompts them to make a new queen).
So in order to introduce a new queen we have to make sure that she can/will stay in the hive long enough that her scent becomes pervasive and that she doesn’t run away.
The way we manage this is we put the queen in a cage (as shown above).
Note that she’s not on her own for a reason – that being that she can’t actually feed herself, so if we didn’t put a couple of bees in there with her she’d be getting pretty hungry.
Notice the white stuff?
It’s sugar (well sugar like) and forms a timed barrier.
The idea of the sugar is that by the time the colony has eaten its way into the cage (typically a few days) the queens scent will be pervasive and so she’ll be free in her own environment, second it ensures that she has food whilst she’s waiting to be rescued.
The cage is suspended between two frames just to ensure that her scent even penetrates the wax and existing food/brood if possible and ensures that there will be a flow of traffic over her.
It’s perhaps also worth noting that even after the queen has had a few days in the cage and emerges she might still be rejected by the colony (and either killed or thrown out) – but then a queen that they make themselves can also be born damaged (due to the weakness of the old queen or environmental factors) but at least this way you don’t have to wait a month to find out.
If you're wondering what the bees would look like inside the hive it's like this (I made an observation layer, it was taken off after the nuc was put in the forest):
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this, I know it was quite long - but if you’ve got this far then now you know how it works.
If you’re a fellow bee keeper and you’re looking for more info feel free to drop me a line. |
