Jim and I were excited to see whether the newly emerged queen from 2 weeks ago in the Alpha hive was busy laying eggs. As we approached the hive, they were behaving normal so we expected all to be well. We removed the top cover and the guard bees looked at us as they always do with the "not again" look. We removed 2 of the honey supers, the queen excluder and as we inspected the first brood super we noticed it was full of honey. We removed a frame in the middle of the super and lo and behold Jim spotted the Queen Bee Marie Antoinette immediately...he's got a great eye at finding her.
We held that frame with Marie Antoinette and pulled frame after frame trying to spot eggs...but there weren't any. What we had read about in the books about consecutive rainy days combined with a newly emerged queen was a recipe for disaster and it happened to us. Because of the consecutive rainy days the queen doesn't leave the hive to mate and after a few days of this, the queen gives up and ends up laying unfertilized eggs (drones) and eventually the entire hive dies.
Keeping with tradition of any queen named Marie Antoinette, I was forced to chop off her head. Here's a picture of Marie Antoinette before she went to the guillotine.
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| Can you spot the Queen Bee? |
We moved onto Hive C which seemed very sluggish. Bees were coming and going but nothing compared to the busy Alpha Hive. Last week when we checked Hive C, it had a supercedure cell and we were hoping we'd see that a new queen emerged. The frames weren't organized well with comb scattered about in different sizes and shapes...clear sign that a queen didn't exist. We sealed up the hive and took off for Greenwich New York...home to a large beekeeping facility named BetterBees.
We arrived after a tranquil drive through several small towns with beautiful old homes. When reached BetterBees, there were many cars there picking up everything from packaged bees to honey extracting equipment. While waiting on line to pick up 2 new queen bees, a neurotic, loud woman and her husband decided to chat up me and Jim. They started beekeeping last summer but have no idea what to do with a hive. She said that the whole family is afraid of the bees and they go running into the house screaming when the bees come near them. I thought that was an odd comment for someone interested in raising bees. When I asked her if she suits up she said that she never bothered to buy one and uses an old $5 wedding dress & veil and rubber dishwashing gloves when she adds more boxes to the hive. At that point Jim and I looked at each other and realized she and her husband (who kept his distance from her) were loons.
We picked up the 2 queen bees, said goodbye to the loons and drove back home excited that we had 2 eager queen bees ready to lay thousands of eggs in the waiting comb. One of the caged queen bees began piping loudly and when we researched it online, the article said they do that when they're virgin queens ready to battle another queen OR they make that sound soon after mating. We're hoping that she's a mated queen but time will tell.
At BetterBee we also purchased a 5 frame nuc. I wanted to try an experiment to see if it worked. The experiment was to remove the frame from Hive C with the supercedure cell (and messed up comb) and put it in the nuc with a few bees AND taking a frame of honeycomb from Alpha Hive along with bees and putting it in the nuc as well. Originally I didn't want to take any bees from Hive C since their numbers were dwindling but about 30 of them wouldn't leave so into the nuc they went too. I sealed the nuc up and checked it the next day. There weren't as many bees as we'd like but we're hoping they'll do what they need to do and keep the nuc going. We have fingers crossed that they'll make it but I don't believe there were enough bees to manage the colony until the queen emerges and starts laying eggs. They need at least 1000 bees at a minimum to build the comb quickly and keep out any unwanted pests such as moths from invading their space.
Installing the queen bees into Hive C and Alpha hive was successful and we'll check next weekend to make sure all went well.
Also worth noting is that we noticed the new queen bees were thinner than Marie Antoinette. It could be that they're Carniolan bees and Marie Antoinette was an Italian Honeybee or it's possible that Marie Antoinette mated later and it took a few days longer to produce fertilzed eggs....swelling her abdomen.
If you had a difficult time spotting Marie Antoinette, here she is circled:
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