From Four Queens to Two

I spent three informative, sweaty hours with the bees today. This has been a most illuminating month, a month of great learning. In retrospect, there is much I wish I had known three weeks ago, but I know now for the future.

When I opened the Daffodil nuc and the Damaris hive yesterday, I was so pleased to see beautiful worker brood, enclosed and metamorphosing. The two queens we've seen got right to work and have an impressive number of babies on the way. It was a helpful benchmark: they both have brood of about the same development.

So I went to check the other hives today, knowing, more or less, what I was looking for.

And I finally had to face the truth that has been niggling at my mind: the original swarm, with the mature queen, was queenless, and has probably been queenless almost from the beginning. I remember about three days after rehiving, the bees sounded loud and upset in their hive. Looking back, I am guessing that's around the time she died.

That explains the cup or so of wax flakes that the bees have produced. It explains the general lack of vigorous growth: they built some comb on most frames, but not much, by comparison. It explains why there are always some bees foraging, but not many, compared with the other hives. It explains why I was surprised by how little they had produced. It explains why their observation tray has been devoid of droppings and pollen. The bees have had no direction, no big picture to guide them. They've muddled along, so they have a little bit of stores, but their frames weigh a few ounces when I pick them up, compared with the heft of a five pound Damaris frame.

What threw me was that I was thinking I needed a few weeks for the queen, slimmed down from her flight, to regain weight enough to start laying. No. I should have seen eggs within five to seven days. (I had wondered about this, but none of my books mentioned it: I finally found that detail today on a piece of paper that I wish I had remembered three weeks ago. The virgin queens may take some weeks; the queen mothers should lay within a week.)

I finally noticed a few eggs: some cells had a dozen. I have some laying workers, a pathetic situation when queenless bees don't realize they don't have a queen, and the unfertilized ovaries of the workers begin to produce eggs, which will all hatch as drones. There was one partial queen cell built, but whether that was long ago or recent, I'm not sure. In any case, without a fertilized egg (laid by a queen), there is no hope for the hive to produce another queen.

My first step was to swap the vibrant Daffodil nuc for the queenless Celestial hive. The Daffodil queen now has a full deep, with her beautiful five frames with brood, and five empty frames to build into.

What to do with the queenless nuc?

There were two options that appealed to me. (A third option, to go a ways from the hive, then drop the frames on the ground so all the bees fall, didn't work well. The laying workers are supposed to be so heavy with their eggs that they can't return to the hive, but I don't think that actually happened. Maybe I didn't have any heavily pregnant bees.)

One option is to take a frame of uncapped brood from a strong hive, along with the attendant bees, and put it in a queenless hive. The pheromones from the new brood wake up the laying workers, and hopefully, within a week, they create an emergency queen.

The other option is to do a standard combine: put newspaper down on top of the frames of a strong hive, make a few slits so the smell wafts through the hive, then put the queenless hive on top. The danger with this is that the queenless bees might ball up the queen and kill her. That's a bummer.

Ideally, I would have done the first option: take a frame of brood from Damaris, and hope for the best.

But then I opened the original hive that produced three swarms. It showed no signs of eggs, except for a few scattered drone cells here and there. There is almost no honey, very few workers: the bottom level is surprisingly light, though the top level is filled enough that I have trouble lifting it. I saw no eggs (presumably, then, no laying workers, or at least very few), but the hive clearly had no queen.

So I ended up using both options. For the original hive, I took a frame with some uncapped brood and inserted it in, making sure the queen was not on that frame. She needs to stay with her babies! None of the workers, either new or old, made any sort of stressed out hum, so presumably that went well.

Then I took all the best Damaris frames and put them on the lowest level (Damaris had built up rapidly enough, I had given it a second level, but that second level hadn't been well utilized). I put paper down, made the slits, and moved the nuc with laying workers over.

At the end: two deeps on the original Celadon hive, with one Damaris frame inserted (on the left of the photos). Damaris on the bottom, Celestial on the top (on the right).

Despite having half the number of queens I thought, I am undaunted. There is hope for the Celadon hive, hope for all. And if I come away with three healthy hives, that's fantastic! And if I end up with only two, but they're both extra strong, that's okay, too.

***

I finally finished transplanting all the osage oranges into pots. I think they will be happy, with less weed pressure.

The sheep are in a tall section of cover crop. When Phil set up the netting, the grass was up to his belly button.

Phil got up early this morning to move the chicken house. He noted the three rogue birds were out scratching their old spot. Within an hour, the three were joined by their compatriots, abandoning their house parked near cow pies teeming with fly larvae.

This evening, though, about ten of the chickens headed back to their house, walking determinedly, single file. Maybe tomorrow he won't have to catch and carry any of the birds.