Queen in the box

My hive has been emitting a cloud of bees every lunchtime for at least the past three days, following my abject failure at swarm control. Today was no exception. Yet another swarm filled the air shortly after noon. The difference this time was that they stayed in sight and settled within reach, condensing at the end of an elder tree branch in the garden, conveniently accessible by stepladder.

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You just hold a container underneath, give the branch a sharp shake, and the swarm of bees drops neatly into the container with a satisfying thud. Yeah, sometimes it happens like that. But sometimes like today it happens like this: you hold a container underneath, give the branch a sharp shake, and about half the bees drop into the container, while a large number erupt into the air and a lot remain on the branch. So you put your first container (a skep) upside down on a sheet on the ground, with the rim propped up on a stone so bees can get in and pheromones can get out. Then you get your second container (cardboard box) and repeat the process, gathering another cluster of bees. Then you stand back and observe that quite a lot of bees are still in the air, and quite a lot of bees are still on the branch, and you don’t know where the queen is. So you put a third container (cardboard box) over the bees on the branch, and you go away and leave the bees to vote with their feet (or wings) for the container that the queen is in.

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When I returned, the electoral results were clear:

Box in tree: 0 votes

Box on ground: 0 votes

Skep: all the votes!

Nucleus box with new swarm

So I did get the queen with that first shake. I should’ve then left them there till dusk, so that the scout bees would all have returned from viewing prospective homes before I picked up the skep and took the bees to an empty hive. But the memory of the prime swarm leaving the damson tree so soon was still sharp. I didn’t want to risk losing yet another swarm. So I grabbed the skep then and there and took the swarm back to the apiary, where I rehomed it in a nucleus box. This evening, there are scout bees circling the elder branch around the place where the swarm used to be. I feel rather bad about it. I wonder whether they will be able to remember their old home and return to it, or whether their memories have been irreversibly reset. The fact that they are still out there seems to indicate the latter, or at least that their “reprogramming” is quite robust. Hopefully, though, they will eventually give up the swarm for lost and will follow the trail of Nasonov pheromone to one of the apiary hives.

Bees from the swarm began fanning as soon as they were in the nucleus box. One bee very helpfully stationed herself as a Nasonov beacon at the hive entrance, tail in the air, wings beating to fan the pheromone.

I noticed that the bees in the original hive were doing the same thing, arrayed all across the landing board. Too much time seemed to have passed for this to still be related to their earlier swarming, so I hovered to watch for a while, calculating that it was possibly about time that a new queen in that hive would be starting to go on mating flights, and that this might be the bees signalling the way back home for her. So I watched the landing board in case I was lucky enough to see a queen’s return.

And I did see something! Not on the landing board, but climbing on a plant in front of it, there was a queen bee.

Could this be the new young queen, gone out for her first flight, and now trying to get home? I picked her up.

Instead of walking, she was clinging to the plant stem and rubbing her legs over her abdomen, as if she was trying to get clean. And then I saw that something was wrong - the wings on her left side were small and deformed. She would be unable to fly.

I guessed that the bees had encouraged her to leave the hive, to practise flying and maybe to take her first mating flight. And she had tried, and fallen down.

If this is the one queen that the colony have left, or the one they have chosen, then it seems very unlikely they will succeed. She won’t be able to take a mating flight, and therefore won’t be able to lay fertilised eggs.

But maybe the bees kicked this poor queen out of the hive. Maybe they have another queen in reserve. Unless that was the queen who swarmed today.

I wasn’t sure what to do with the queen in my hand. I wondered whether the bees would rush to welcome her back, or whether they would drive her away again. I put her on the corner of the landing board, and she made a beeline for the entrance, marching straight in.

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Make way for the Queen

If there is another queen in that hive, and I kind of hope there is, then returning the half-winged queen was probably an error. Maybe time will tell.

I am anyway reasonably sure that the swarm I retrieved have their own queen still with them, because they so decisively moved into the skep.

So I now have three colonies, each of which will probably be trying to get their queen mated over the next week or so. Fortunately the weather is looking ok for mating flights. So I will open the hives in a couple of weeks’ time and see whether any of them have a laying queen.

The sun came out, and so did the bees

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The shape

I saw them as soon as I stepped into the garden. That shape in the damson tree. I suppose it was predictable - weeks of almost constant rain and then, at last, a sunny afternoon. The bees must have been waiting for it just as we all were. They seized the moment and swarmed.

I don’t know who it is up in the tree. I’ve not been able to open the hives to see what the bees have been up to for at least a fortnight. They and I have been holed up inside wondering if it would ever stop raining.

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Dancing in the moonlight

When I do inspect the colonies, I think I’ll have some new names to add to the family tree of Queens. But it’s not simple to identify where the new queens are. For instance, I noted before that Queen Peony’s colony were undergoing supercedure. But how can I tell whether that supercedure has actually taken place? When I last checked, the colony had at least one laying queen, as evidenced by the presence of eggs and brood. Plates and plates of capped brood, in fact. But I didn’t see the queen. And the supercedure cells had been torn down from the comb. Had a new queen emerged, mated and begun laying spectacularly well? Or had the colony had a change of heart and decided to retain Queen Peony? Or had Queen Peony discovered the plot and despatched the pretenders to the throne? Seeing two queens would of course have given the game away, as would seeing a queen that I didn’t recognise to be Queen Peony. But for now, I’m still wondering.

I think I also discovered a supercedure plan in Queen Queenie’s colony. They had a single, huge sealed queen cell, like a cigar, hanging from the very bottom of one of the brood frames. Queen Queenie was there, at the other end of the brood box, while the middle frames contained empty space - polished brood cells ready to receive eggs. I was fairly sure I was seeing supercedure plans, rather than swarming plans: just one queen cell, already sealed but with the resident queen still present, and signs that the bees were keeping the queen away from the queen cell. But now, of course, with a swarm of bees hanging in a tree, I wonder whether I misread the signs. Or maybe I blunderingly damaged the queen cell when putting the frame back into the hive, resulting in the bees deciding to swarm instead? I often worry that I’ve messed things up by opening a hive, but the only way to check whether I did would be to open the hive again, thereby risking messing things up even if I didn’t mess them up the first time.

Besides Queen-Peony-and/or-her-daughter and Queen-Queenie-and/or-her-daughter, these are the queens I think I have:

Queen Ottilie (unless that’s her up in the tree);

Queen Ottilie’s daughter (because I split the colony into two, to discourage swarming…though if this half of the colony did swarm, then I could have one daughter in the tree and one or more in the hive);

Queen Romaine’s daughter (Queen Romaine having swarmed);

Queen Romaine’s other daughter (because I split the remaining colony after the swarm left, to discourage cast swarming); and

Queen Uma.

Fingers crossed for beekeeping weather tomorrow.

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24 hours of rain. The rain gauge has never been so happy.

Update 17th June 2019

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I looked up at the swarm this morning before I left for work. Despite the early morning coolth, bees were dancing on the surface. I thought I probably wouldn’t see them again.

Sadly I was right.

Sigh.