BEE CRAZY!! Queen...no Queen...new Queen!

Ok so right around June my bees were rockin'. There was capped brood, eggs, pollen and a nice big fat juciy queen bee buzzing around working her magic. Now when I say magic I really mean it! There is a lot going on inside a bee hive just because of the Mother Bee, aka queen bee.

Her importance can not be underestimated. Everything the hive does, except for just about one thing, which we'll discuss later, is to make the Mother Bee happy and to provide her with the nourishment she needs to keep popping out eggs.

So my queen seemed to be doing great. At least she seemed to me to be doing great. Well right after that, our queen vanished. No note, no teary goodbyes, she just wasn't there anymore. Of course it was my fault or it least I was thinking of all the reasons it could be - maybe I squished her accidentally while moving frames around. Or maybe I inadvertently dropped her outside the hive while looking for her on previous inspections. I started having nightmares about squished bees.

Once I realized she was missing, I freaked out! I scrambled through my notes from my bee class, the class at Beez Neez Apiary was great but was my note taking? I found some sketchy details about re-queening but hardly enough to help make a decision. So I looked up a local expert. I called one of the mentors from the Westsound Beekeeping Association, there are several on the island. After a quick call I was relieved a bit but also started worrying. The mentors response to the situation was to leave the hive to itself and they would replace the queen. This relieved me because to buy a new queen would be expensive and take time to track down. His advice also had me worried too because I wasn't certain my bees would be up to the task. That was a big question and I couldn't just as the bees if they were up to it, I'd just have to wait and see. A hard task for a nervous nelly.


Well when the hive discovered (or maybe they already knew sometimes a hive will remove their queen) that the Mother Bee was gone they went right to work turning one of the remaining uncapped brood cells into a supercedure cell. This supercedure cell grows much longer than typical brood cells. Luckily I had the pieces required to make a new queen in my hive: uncapped brood, a healthy population of workers, and drone or male bees.

Amazing picture taken by Chantal Foster

After several nerve racking weeks, the supercedure cell was uncapped and the queen emerged. The new queen then left the hive. I know you're thinking what I'm thinking...she left the hive! Well she left to go on her mating flight. Of course there are risks involved with this whole process. The virgin queen could get eaten by a bird, she could just fly away, or she could mate with drones from another hive...all bad things, or least I am told. By now I had read up on what my hive was going through. Kinda like reading, "What to Expect When You're Expecting," right before your baby is due. So yeah I was a bundle of nerves and knew all the bad things that could happen to my hive.

Well one sunny day about two weeks after the supercedure cell was closed, the virgin queen emerged from the hive with a small escort of worker bees and all the drone bees from the hive. Did I have the wherewithal to take pictures? No! But do look at this bee photographers amazing work, Eric Tourneret, he actually captured closeup images of the mating flight. Of course we didn't see this amazing level of detail, but rather heard the intense humming sound of hundreds of bees swirling around the top of the nearby Red Cedar tree. Of course I saw swallows darting through the mass of bees and of course I wrung my hands, rooting for the home team.

The mating flight lasted for several hours. The humming diminished and was no longer visible after dark. After about two more weeks I opened up my hive and found a new Mother Bee, quietly placing eggs in the comb, busy at her work.

Downsides of not buying a new queen for a quick fix, is that this year we didn't get any honey from the hive. On the upside I feel like we have a new queen that the hive is happy with, at least for now.