Some strange and unexpected things can happen in beekeeping - here are some of them
Hello dear listeners, and welcome to another episode of the Walrus and The Honey Bee Podcast. My name is Imogen, and I'm doing this because my voice is beautiful, whereas Steve Donohoe, who creates the content, is a mere biological life form, and therefore not as perfect as me. I'm going to be reading from Steve's blog post called Beekeeping Twilight Zone, which is about some odd or unexpected things that happen in beekeeping. Settle down, because here goes.
Sometimes unexpected things happen in beekeeping. What seems weird to me, or peculiar, or interesting, may not chime with you, but here are a few cases that caused a raised eyebrow or two. Welcome to my beekeeping twilight zone.
Her Majesty Returns
Recently, the Mole and I were inspecting a colony that had clearly swarmed. Because we clip a wing of our queens, it was still a strong colony. The queen was gone, so she will have fallen to the ground as the swarm departed. Then the swarm, realising that they had no queen, returned home. We use mostly solid floors, so we don’t get that nonsense with bees hanging underneath. We knew that the queen was gone because (a) we had a good look and could not see her and (b) there were no eggs on any combs, but there were several sealed queen cells.
Next, we carried out our usual routine of destroying all queen cells except for one, then closed up the hive. On the next inspection, we found the queen had returned and was happily laying eggs, and there were no viable queen cells at all. The one that we had left had been torn down. Her majesty had her green dot and clipped wing; she must have managed to crawl back. I suppose that must mean that she fell to the ground quite near to the hive entrance. This is probably something that many beekeepers have seen, but it’s the first time I have. I’m not even sure I welcome her return, as she will need to be changed at the end of the season anyway – perhaps a nice new one would have been better for us.
Hopelessly Queenless
This brings me to the next thing, also queen-related. When we leave one queen cell after a swarm, or even before one having removed the queen in a nuke, things don’t always go to plan. Occasionally, they make more cells and a cast swarm leaves (a swarm with a virgin queen). Other times we come back three or four weeks later to find no queen, no brood, and a hopelessly queenless colony populated by some old workers and drones. Not every virgin queen gets successfully mated and returns safely to her home. I reckon about 20% go missing depending on many factors, including weather, time of year, number of colonies at the apiary, and so forth. Paul Horton has found that using landing boards or hive panels made of correx, decorated with different patterns and colours, reduces the number of lost queens.
Some beekeepers like to leave two queen cells rather than one to provide some kind of insurance. In my experience, leaving more than one cell almost always means that they swarm. But leaving one cell means that 20% of the time they will end up hopelessly queenless. It’s a pain.
We have also had the situation whereby there are many ripe queen cells about to ‘pop’ so we open them up and release the virgin queens into the colony. It’s actually quite fun seeing the new virgin queens escape their cells and scuttle across a comb and into the hive. Releasing all the virgins at once, and removing all queen cells, should theoretically result in one surviving queen who will mate and continue the line. However, we have done this a few times and every so often no virgin survives, and we are left with a queenless, broodless colony.
When this happens, we normally shake the bees out and remove the hive. Occasionally, we will add a frame or two of brood from a neighbouring colony and give them a queen (or a queen cell). It depends on available resources and how strong the queenless colony is.
Drone Power
During the rapid spring build up, especially if the weather is good, the bees become very keen on producing drones. They will build drone combs anywhere they can, especially in any places where bee-space is wrong. I don’t like combs to be too mixed up; I like most of the combs to be for worker brood, and one to be all drones. This season we tried making up frames with no wax foundation in them – just a couple of bamboo skewers stretching across the frame and some lollipop sticks along the underside of the top bars. When placed in strong colonies at the correct time, we found that the bees gratefully turn the whole thing into a lovely frame of pure drone comb. I was inspired to do this by David Evans (The Apiarist), with the only difference being that his bamboo sticks run vertically whereas mine are horizontal.
I would not want to encourage the production of loads of drones from unpleasant colonies, but we don’t tolerate unpleasant colonies anyway. Well, we try not to. The advantage of allowing the bees to dedicate an entire frame to drones is that, with luck, they don’t ‘mess up’ other combs by mixing up worker and drone brood, which I don’t particularly like. Drone comb is where the varroa mites will hang out, but we treated our colonies in March, so we are happy to let the drones be born and mate with local queens. We don’t like removing drone brood as part of varroa control; drones are important for producing great queens – but obviously not drones riddled with mites.
Fast Mating
I remember Randy Oliver telling me that there should be no ‘rule of thumb’ in beekeeping, and that everything has to be taken on its merits. Well, be that as it may, my rule of thumb in queen rearing is that, once a virgin has emerged, she needs to be mated within two to three weeks. Before two weeks is good; after three weeks is not great – maybe the queens will not be so good after that. In terrible weather conditions, we have seen queens get mated at about four weeks, but they can often fail over the winter. Anyway, if I’m making queens for my beekeeping business, I want the best of everything. I want my queens mated within two weeks of emergence, ideally.
This season has started incredibly well in my area. There has been a lot of sunshine, and nectar has been flooding into the hives. Arable farmers are complaining about a lack of rain, but in my patch the bees are having a party. This gorgeous weather prompted me to start grafting earlier than in previous seasons. We did our first grafts on 14th April and the next batch on 22nd April. Normally, that would be a recipe for unmated queens, but this year they are happily laying away, having been mated very quickly.
We found some queens were mated five days after emergence. That seems pretty quick to me. Most will be moving to nucleus boxes, then into hives later in the season, or kept small and sold as nukes next spring.
Usurp-ation
This sounds unlikely, but I know somebody who witnessed it happen, right in front of her eyes. A swarm arrived and took over a colony in a hive in her garden. At first, she thought that her colony was swarming, but it became evident that, in fact, a new swarm had arrived. The next day, she checked on the colony, and it had a new queen. I can’t remember precisely the circumstances, but I think it was a marked queen with a different colour. She explained what she had seen to me, and I was, shall we say, a little circumspect.
However, after I looked into it, I realised that this phenomenon does indeed occur, but it is rarely observed. The swarm arrives, takes over an existing colony, kills the original queen, and settles in. This could look like supercedure if the newly arrived queen had no mark on her.
Absconding
I have only personally experienced this occasionally with mini mating nukes, due to me not setting them up correctly from the start. However, it was associated with the so-called ‘colony collapse disorder’ in the USA. As far as I know, something similar might have been going on over there very recently, with very high losses widely reported. With absconding, what seems to happen is that the beekeeper finds a dead hive with very few bees (dead or alive). In some cases, this might be that they all got very stressed and decided to bugger off for pastures new, abandoning their home en masse. In many other cases, what happens is that there is a continuous drip-drip effect in which bees gradually die off in the field, weakening the colony, which sets off a cascade resulting in the same thing.
The ‘en-masse buggering off’ syndrome appears to be more common with certain genetics, such as Apis mellifera scutellata (African honey bees). It appears to be stress related; something, or things, stress the bees to such a point that they decide to move house, leaving their babies behind. The degree of stress experienced by bees is multifactorial; disease, nutrition, environment – at some point one more stressor becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
The form of colony collapse that many experience has been brilliantly illustrated by Randy Oliver. Viruses, made more virulent by high levels of varroa mites, are often part of the picture, with Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV) being the one regularly involved with colony collapse. Nosema is another sickness that seems to rear its head as bees get stressed, for whatever reason. Some recent research has shown the presence of a virus that infects wax moths, but I don’t know if that is something that happens after the bees die off and the moths move in.
Queen Stings
I used to think that it was impossible to be stung by a queen bee. Until a year ago, I don’t think I had ever met a single person, including many bee farmers with hundreds or thousands of colonies, that had been stung by one. Apparently, rare as it is, it can happen. But I think, in the extremely rare cases some people say it happened, that a worker may have stung the beekeeper while they were handling the queen, and they attributed it to the queen. It’s a difficult one to prove. I have handled plenty of queens, and the only weird things that happened to me are (a) feinting and (b) flying off. When handling queens in mating nukes on a sunny afternoon, it is wise to spray water onto the queen to stop her from taking flight.
Fighting Queens
Many people believe that queens fight, but actually, it is virgin queens that fight. Mated queens are docile. I was with Mike Palmer one summer when his team was re-queening colonies, and he put three mated queens in a cage to see what they would do. They did not fight, and the three of them were wandering about the next day, completely uninterested in one another. Virgin queens are the brawlers; they often have to dispatch rivals in true Highlander style (there can only be one).
It’s odd that if you release a virgin queen from a ripe queen cell in a colony, the workers will sometimes chase the virgin around, trying to sting her. I think this indicates that it’s the workers who together form the ‘hive mind’ of a colony, and they don’t like it when the beekeeper messes with their plans. Workers can also ball a mated queen who has just been marked, once she is returned to the hive (I have seen this). This is why many beekeepers don’t mark young queens, but wait until they are fully established in a colony. I tend to mark them before winter, but some people leave it until spring.
What Do You Think?
Readers may well have different experiences to me, or alternative explanations for strange goings-on in a bee hive. Please don’t hesitate to share your thought in the comments section!
Okay, that's the end of this episode. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please share it with your beekeeping buddies. See you in the next episode.