#17. Swarm warning

Wednesday was bee class in Riverhead.  The topic of the evening's lecture was requeening, that is:  why, when, and how to replace the existing queen with a new model.

In feral colonies and unmanaged hives, the worker bees take matters into their own 'hands'.  When they determine that a queen is failing, they will raise a new queen and kill the reigning monarch, as in "The queen is dead - long live the Queen!"  Queens emit pheromones, and these airborne organic compounds are what give the queen her mojo and knit the hive together.  14 distinct pheromones have been identified in queens.  When, due to age or infirmity, the queen's capacity to produce these pheromones in sufficiently potent quantities wanes, the word spreads through the colony instantly, and the workers start to raise a replacement for her.  They modify a wax worker cell to accommodate a queen's larger frame and they modify the diet of the newly-hatched larva within to 100% royal jelly, and - voila! - about 2 weeks later a new queen emerges.  Just beforehand, the workers will kill their mother and dump the body - or body parts if they've dismembered her - outside the hive.

Of course, the newly-emerged queen is a virgin and must be mated before she is a viable matriarch.  She mates on the wing - often far from the hive - and, (and it's a big "and") has to make it back to the hive without getting lost, and in one piece, avoiding birds, wasps and other death traps along the way.  Apparently only about 10% of queens don't make it back, which I think is pretty good, given the risks.  And if she doesn't make it back, the colony is doomed; there is no queen to produce any more workers.  In theory, if a beekeeper is on top of things, she can spot a queenless hive and buy a queen, if she can find one and introduce it to the hive without getting her killed.  All I can say is that if a queen gets lost in any of my hives, they're probably out of luck.

In my blog post #9 I explain the queen's mating rituals and I also promised to make corrections if I found I'd misstated something.  Well, I need to fine-tune details about the mating flights.  I understood that the queen needed to return to the hive after every mating, to be groomed by house bees in preparation for her next encounter with an airborne drone.  Not so.  On each mating flight (there can be several) she will mate multiple times, each subsequent successful suitor grabbing her, mid-air, and yanking out his predecessor's trailing entrails before thrusting his own 'member' in her 'sting chamber' and thus disemboweling himself.  By the way, there was a lot of chatter regarding post #9 and  my use of the term 'bee vagina'.  Well, as it turns out, that is what it's called.  In a jaw-droppingly fascinating passage about historical attempts to artificially inseminate queens (as in creating an artificial to-scale steel bee penis!) in Hannah Nordhaus's excellent book The Beekeeper's Lament, there it is, on page 189, a reference to a bee vagina.  So there.  (By the way, read the book and you will probably never buy imported honey again.  You may also have second thoughts about eating almonds...) 


It is not just in times of crisis that bees will raise new queens, however.  When times are good and the colony experiences an explosion in their numbers, they take the opportunity to go forth and multiply by swarming.  The sitting monarch will sally forth with a contingent of several thousand loyal daughters.  They will leave the hive, often around the middle of the day.  The air fills with a massive cloud of bees and, almost cartoon-like, they follow their queen onto a nearby branch, split-rail fence, or some other temporary hitching post, until scout bees locate permanent new digs, usually a mile or more away, preferably in a hollow tree - less preferably under someone's porch.


When my beekeeping class began in February we were told that first-year hives generally don't swarm; they're too busy building up a nascent colony to think about expansion plans.  And, of course, our queens were young when they arrived and so not likely to be replaced by the colony.  So it was with some surprise that I learned from my bee buddy Mike that his bees swarmed early in May.  Multiple 'secondary' swarms from the same hive followed, which is common, as it turns out.  Mike managed to capture 2 of the swarms, so he has now gone from 1 hive to 3 - all in year 1!  (If this happens every year...well, just do the math.  He would have over 200 hives in 5 years,  almost 650 hives in 6 years.  Yikes.  Did I do that right?  Jorg, help me out here, please!)  And it turns out that there were classmates other than Mike whose bees swarmed within the last month.  So a lot of Wednesday night's class was devoted to swarms:  understanding them and managing them, which dovetailed nicely into the subject of queen replacement, which is part of swarm management.

Well, as it happens, yesterday afternoon, around 2 pm, my ward and protege, Jaime, made a trip to the town dump.  Even though it's one of my favorite excursions, I decided to stay home and continue gardening.  If I had gone with Jaime, I would have missed all the action, because by the time Jaime returned, the mass exodus from the yellow hive was over.  I don't think I would have noticed the tight bundle of bees, hanging, like a fuzzy football, hidden among the boughs of a red cedar:  the only residual clue that my bees had swarmed.

The first thing you notice during a swarm event is the unmistakable din - the hum of thousands of bees, levitating, filling the air above the hive.  And I'll admit it:  it crossed my mind to ignore the entire episode - heck, if I'd gone to the dumps with Jaime...

I couldn't believe it!!  We'd had a lecture about swarming Wednesday night, and not 24 hours later I had a swarm!  What are the odds?  Of course, being the micro-managing control freak that I am, ignoring the swarm wasn't really an option, was it?  So I started scrambling around to jerry-rig a Hive #3, what will become Team Purple, if they survive the transition from swarm to managed colony without dying or absconding.

I had an extra medium super I could use as a mini brood box.  And I had plenty of new frames.  I quickly made a bottom board out of a piece of scrap plywood.  Glued and nailed thin cedar battens around 3 sides - the forth side would provide the hive with an entrance.  To mitigate the lack of depth in a single medium box, I added a 'slatted bottom board' between the plywood bottom board and the hive body, which should give the bees some extra wiggle room.  I initially placed just 2 frames, one on either side of the brood box.  Then I bungeed the whole affair together so that I could move it around as a unit.

I had read that it is best to move a swarm in the evening.  So around 7 pm, when the bees were tightly balled and content - "drunk with love", as Mike says - I sprayed them down pretty thoroughly with sugar water.  I think they liked it, and they're less likely to fly around when they're coated in syrup.  Then I placed and steadied my grandfather's old wooden ladder (oh! how I wished he were alive to witness this!) right under the swarm.  When I put the hive box on top of the ladder, it was just a few inches from the bottom of the swarm.  With my left hand I grasped the pliant cedar bough just above the swarm and pulled gently, lowering the ball of bees into the box.  I clutched a big stick in my right hand and, holding my breath, gave the cedar branch a couple of good whacks, until every bee had dropped from the branch into the bottom of the box.  I covered the hive, still perched on top of the ladder, with a piece of loose plywood, and retreated.

When I checked back 15 minutes later, I witnessed a behavior that Ray Lackey had described in class on Wednesday.  On the lip of the box, around the wide crack created by the warped plywood cover, an orderly conga line of bees had assumed the position - faces to the floor, butts in the air, wings beating madly.  They were fanning their queen's pheromones out into the atmosphere, calling all their sister bees who might have been detoured or waylaid during the swarming melee.

Shortly before dark I clasped the new hive box in gloved hands and carefully - oh, so carefully - picked my way through the rocks and weed piles about 20 yards to a quickly-improvised hive stand.  Once I placed the hive, I lifted the plywood lid.  All the bees were covering one of the wide inner sides of the box and the adjacent frame.  I removed the bungees and carefully slid in 6 more frames - one with partially-drawn comb 'borrowed' from the red hive's honey super.  I placed a disused feeder box on top of the hive box.  In it I laid a deep frame - one of the original nuc frames from the yellow hive, which was partially filled with uncapped honey.   I hope they like it.  Then I slapped a piece of plywood atop the makeshift hive, weighed the rickety cover down with rocks, and said good night.

It was a miserable, rainy, cool morning today when Jaime checked Team Purple.  The bees are still there.  Glad I gave them some food as they won't be foraging in this weather.

So why did Team Yellow swarm?  It's possible that, early on, I was overly concerned with their seeming lack of oomph (compared to Team Red), and that when I switched the positions of the red and yellow hives on the hive stand, thereby artificially increasing the number of bees in the yellow hive, I created a swarm condition.  I don't know.  And who wears the crown in the purple hive?  If I find a blue dot on that queen I will know that she's my original, marked queen from Team Yellow.  If so, I now have a virgin queen in the yellow hive, with all the uncertainty that situation implies.  If it's an unmarked queen in the purple hive, maybe I missed the primary swarm and this is an after-swarm.  And will there now be more swarms to come?

Stay tuned...