Sunny Days

A bee in flight while the sun beams down.

There has been a lot of sun, and a lot of moisture up to this point, for the year. So how many wildflowers are needed for an apiary to be successful? There is an overabundance of wildflowers and flowering landscaping around our queens. Bees forage for miles. Within a couple miles there is residential neighborhoods with elaborate floral gardens. The local HOA's gratuitously plant plots of flowers in common areas. Many common garden flowers are good for honey bees, like the butterfly bushes and the marigolds. There are miles upon miles of rural county roads that are lined with sunflowers, goldenrod, thistle, and dozens of other flowering weeds. 

Right here in the bee yard, the monkshood and the vetches are dying back like many of the other little white and purple flowers that have been blanketing the field. 

These flowers are just making way for the fall blooms to come in just like the dandelions and clover did a few months ago.

These tiny yellow flowers coming in now are too small to be obvious from the road as you drive by. There are millions of them across the field just like the vetches were in June. We definitely have plenty of flowers to support many colonies in this area.

Last weekend, I checked the queen-less hive to check the progress of the queen cells. They were all destroyed. I checked very carefully to find out if a new queen had taken over. I found brand new eggs. I found Larvae in all stages. And I found Doris.

Back from vacation and ready to go back to work, she is laying again and making her presence known. I saw her again today when I was checking up. I am not quite sure what made her take a hiatus.  

So ten days is not enough time for a new queen to take over operations. Further research revealed it should take approximately 23 days. Although, a new queen can emerge in about thirteen days. That is about how long it has been since I started over in the nucleus hive to create queens.

Allow me to introduce the un-mated daughter of Ethyl. Name to be determined once she is laying eggs. She was moved to a shallow hive box with some extra bees to take care of her until she mates naturally.

She is now occupying the apartment just above Doris, since Doris isn't using it. Doris is laying eggs and the workers are foraging but she is simply not productive. Lucy is filling her super with honey. She has not laid any eggs in the upper frames yet so she is still without a queen excluder. And Ethyl, well, she is doing what any beekeeper would expect.

Doris, although one of our first queens, is not considered to be productive. There is plenty of forage, although, she does not seem to build enough numbers at the right time of year to produce the surplus we are all looking for. Additionally, her bees tend to be a great deal more aggressive than the newer colonies in the yard. Doris' hive may need to be re-queened. It may be a little late in the season for this, but I am still learning about queen rearing and what makes a good queen. Perhaps we will look into it for next season if I can breed them. It is apparent that it takes a good queen to be successful.

Shuffling all the bees around today created quite a stir. The air was full of lost bees figuring out where they are supposed to go now.

By the end of it all, everyone is settled back in to their jobs, working in the bright sunshine.

Queens

I recently picked up some books on rearing queens. I wanted to know more about how queens are bread, separated, collected, and so on. I was convinced by authors Doolittle and Pellet of the importance of rearing queens in the role of a beekeeper. I went right to work with Ethyl, collecting a few frames and placing them in a nuc box. In no time, I had a frame full of queen cells.

About a week after I collected the frames from Ethyl, I was performing a routine inspection when I noticed Doris was not doing well at all. I could not locate her anywhere in the hive. There were no new eggs being laid. The youngest larvae I could find were about two days hatched.

I found this frame nearly completely empty. It had what looks like a poor attempt at queen replacement. The next frame was quickly running out of capped brood, too.

Back in the nuc hive, I was trying to isolate the queen cells to hopefully collect more than one queen. The workers were much better at digging them out, than I was at caging them. With this sudden queen disappearance, we had to act fast. I took the frame of queens and added them to the now queen-less hive.

 You can see scars in the comb where I had put queen isolating cages. The bees dug through the comb and dislodged the cages. I will write more about what I have learned later on when I have more to talk about.

Between both sides of the frame, there was a total of eleven queen cells. 48 hours later, the colony narrowed it down to just three. The workers not only discarded the queens, but virtually erased the cells. I wasn't sure what was going on. Could one of the cells have already hatched, mated and began laying eggs in that short amount of time? Oh yeah, I found brand new eggs when I rechecked two days after installing the frame of queen cells. Still, there is a clear age difference between the fresh eggs and the now week old larvae.

I checked the entire hive as thoroughly as possible, then went back and rechecked all the frames. I could not find any queens. I still have no idea who is in charge of this colony, or what I am doing wrong with the queen rearing. I will be going back to the books, but I did swap out another frame of brood from Ethyl to put in my queen box. Properly, there is already new cells started there. Ethyl is by far our best producing queen. It is astonishing to compare the two Italian queens that came from different breeders, and the the Carniolan. We definitely have three very different hives.