Swarm queen cell
The workers and the queen develop from fertilized eggs and thus have a full paired complement of genetic material from both of their parents. They are called diploid. But the queen can also choose to lay sterile eggs—eggs that have not been fertilized and that have only half of the genetic material: genes from their mothers only. Those develop into drones—male bees—and are haploid. Drones are bees who have grandfathers but no father, and who produce grandsons but no sons. Their only role in the colony is to mate with nubile queens. They are not physically equipped to collect nectar or pollen, nor can they defend the hive, for they have no stingers. They are big bees, with big eyes, and they hang out in groups together, watching for a virgin queen. They are not very bright; their brains are small, but not so small as a queen’s, and they have been known to try to mate with a swallow flying by or an artificial queen trailed on a helium balloon by entomologists.
When a drone sees a queen, he flies high in the air to mate with her. He mates by everting his penis into her sting chamber, which closes around it, causing it to rip loose from his body as he bends over backward and falls lifeless to the ground. Queens usually copulate a number of times on their nuptial flights, and when they return to the hive they trail portions of drone gut, which beekeepers euphemistically call “mating sign.”
Drones are found in bee colonies during the spring and early summer, when the workers regard them with favor. Their presence may even help to keep the hive temperature as high as bees like it during this sometimes cool season. But after the queens are mated the drones are no longer needed, and they are a drain on resources, so when the nectar flow begins to taper off in the summer the workers bar the remaining drones from the hives, and they die.
To my knowledge E. B. White never kept bees, but he wrote a fine poem about them:
Song of the Queen Bee
“The breeding of the bee, “says a United States Department of Agriculture bulletin on artificial insemination, “has always been handicapped by the fact that the queen mates in the air with whatever drone she encounters.”
When the air is wine and the wind is free
And the morning sits on the lovely lea
And sunlight ripples on every tree,
Then love-in-air is the thing for me—
I’m a bee,
I’m a ravishing, rollicking, young queen bee,
That’s me.
I wish to state that I think it’s great,
Oh, it’s simply rare in the upper air,
It’s the place to pair
With a bee.
Let old geneticists plot and plan,
They’re stuffy people, to a man;
Let gossips whisper behind their fan.
(Oh, she does?
Buzz, buzz, buzz!)
My nuptial flight is sheer delight;
I’m a giddy girl who likes to swirl,
To fly and soar
And fly some more,
I’m a bee.
And I wish to state that I’ll always mate
With whatever drone I encounter.
There’s a kind of a wild and glad elation
In the natural way of insemination;
Who thinks that love is a handicap
Is a fuddydud and a common sap,
For I am a queen and I am a bee,
I’m devil-may-care and I’m fancy free,
The test tube doesn’t appeal to me,
Not me,
I’m a bee.
And I’m here to state that I’ll always mate
With whatever drone I encounter.
Let mares and cows, by calculating,
Improve themselves with loveless mating,
Let groundlings breed in the modern fashion,
I’ll stick to the air and the grand old passion;
I may be small and I’m just a bee
But I won’t have Science improving me,
Not me,
I’m a bee.
On a day that’s fair with a wind that’s free,
Any old drone is the lad for me.
I have no flair for love moderne,
It’s far too studied, far too stern,
I’m just a bee—I’m wild, I’m free,
That’s me.
I can’t afford to be too choosy;
In every queen there’s a touch of floozy,
And it’s simply rare
In the upper air
And I wish to state
That I’ll always mate
With whatever drone I encounter.
Man is a fool for the latest movement,
He broods and broods on race improvement;
What boots it to improve a bee
If it means the end of ecstasy?
(He ought to be there
On a day that’s fair,
Oh, it’s simply rare
For a bee.)
Man’s so wise he is growing foolish,
Some of his schemes are downright ghoulish;
He owns a bomb that’ll end creation
And he wants to change the sex relation,
He thinks that love is a handicap,
He’s a fuddydud, he’s a simple sap;
Man is a meddler, man’s a boob,
He looks for love in the depths of a tube,
His restless mind is forever ranging,
He thinks he’s advancing as long as he’s changing,
He cracks the atom, he racks his skull,
Man is meddlesome, man is dull,
Man is busy instead of idle,
Man is alarmingly suicidal,
Me, I’m a bee.
I am a bee and I simply love it,
I am a bee and I’m darned glad of it,
I am a bee, I know about love:
You go upstairs, you go above,
You do not pause to dine or sup,
The sky won’t wait—it’s a long trip up;
You rise, you soar, you take the blue,
It’s you and me, kid, me and you,
It’s everything, it’s the nearest drone,
It’s never a thing that you find alone.
I’m a bee,
I’m free.
If any old farmer can keep and hive me,
Then any old drone may catch and wive me;
I’m sorry for creatures who cannot pair
On a gorgeous day in the upper air,
I’m sorry for cows who have to boast
Of affairs they’ve had by parcel post,
I’m sorry for man with his plots and guile,
His test-tube manner, his test-tube smile;
I’ll multiply and I’ll increase
As I always have—by mere caprice;
For I am a queen and I’m a bee,
I’m devil-may-care and I’m fancy-free,
Love-in-air is the thing for me,
Oh, it’s simply rare
In the beautiful air,
And I wish to state
That I’ll always mate
With whatever drone I encounter.
This part of the Ozarks is on the edge of a major flyway for migrating birds, and although few of the summer residents are here—I’ve yet to hear indigo buntings singing, for instance—the warblers have begun to make their appearance. For most of them, this is a way stop only and each spring I have to relearn the various kinds. But for the past several days I have been hearing a call I know well. It is the small Bronx cheer of the blue-winged warblers, who live here all summer. Blue-winged warblers are canary-sized, canary-yellow birds with blue-gray barred wings, olive backs and dressy-looking black lines that run from their beaks to the back of their heads. The guide books hold that blue-winged warblers say Bee-Bzzzz. It would be more accurate to say that when you pass one hidden in the low shrubs, you have the distinct impression that you have just been given the raspberry. I haven’t had much time to spend watching warblers, however. They arrive at the same time I begin my work with queen bees.
The queens are shipped airmail, but even a few days in the mails are too many for a bee, so I try to get each queen into better quarters as quickly as possible, lest her health or egg-laying abilities suffer. For the past several days, I have been assembling the equipment I’ll need to make up fifty new hives. Each one is made of a bottom board, a single hive body, an inner cover and a telescoping cover. I staple the bottom boards to these hive bodies, because each nucleus hive—or nuc, as beekeepers call it—will be moved from place to place. Inside I put a feeder and eight good frames of fully worked comb, and I screen the entrances.
Queens in mailing cages ready to go into temporary queenery
Every year, I make up some hives of bees to sell to people who want to get started with them in the springtime. I also need a few new hives to replace ones that have died out during the previous year, and I need some additional ones for requeening. I use the same procedure for all three needs. There are a number of other ways to requeen, to be sure, which do not involve making up a starter hive but instead call for placing the queen directly into a colony that needs a new one, and then practicing a variety of subterfuges to get the bees to accept her rather than surround her in an angry mass and suffocate her, a process known to beekeepers as “balling.” I have tried those other methods with varying degrees of success and numbers of dead queens. But I have never had a problem with getting bees to accept a new queen when I took the extra step of first starting a queen in her own new temporary hive. It is a procedure that works with the bees’ own biology and behavior rather than against it.
On the morning of the day the queens are due to arrive, I take one of the nucs out to the hives in my home beeyard and pull three frames of brood and young bees from one of them, having first found its queen and made sure that she stays with her hive. I replace the frames I take with empty ones and put the brood frames into the nuc. Then I pick up my shipment of queens from the post office and check them at the kitchen table. I press each acceptable queen cage into a queen frame, after I have assured myself that the queen inside is lively and well. A queen frame is an ordinary frame without any beeswax in it but with two thin strips of wood running from end bar to end bar. These wooden strips divide the frame into the precise length of the wooden queen cages. I put the queen cages endwise between the wooden strips, where they are held in place by friction, and take them out to the nucleus hive and place them in it. The first nuc has become my queenery. The young bees who emerge from the brood area will have no loyalty to their former queen, and small groups of them will immediately start to tend the queens in each of the wooden cages, poking their long tongues through the screened openings to feed them, and covering the screens to generate enough heat to preserve the queens during the cool spring nights. The queenery still does not represent natural conditions for queen bees, but it is better than what they have had for the past several days in the U.S. mails and will serve to keep them in as good condition as possible while I prepare permanent homes for them.
The queenery system works well enough in most weather, but one spring a late snowstorm blew in just as I had finished making up the queenery. I watched as the temperature dropped alarmingly throughout the day and listened to the forecast predicting a 10° F. night. I knew the small force of bees would find it impossible to keep the queens warm in their cages, so I brought the queenery inside my cabin and wrapped it in an old bedspread to cut out the light from the bees, who would try to fly toward it. They were quiet during the night, when it was dark anyway, but when light began to come through the eastern windows, some bees, made lively from the warmth of the woodstove, began to find their way out through the folds in the bedspread. They flew about the house, confused by the interior landscape—which was thoroughly unsuitable from a bee’s standpoint—and clustered in small dispirited groups on the windows. The weather stayed cold and blustery for several days and the bees and I remained roommates for all of them. A friend stopped over one afternoon for coffee, but excused herself when she saw the bees flying around. “I think you may be carrying this bee thing a little far,” she said, backing out of the door. I missed having coffee with my friend, but I saved the queens. Outdoors, each and every six-dollar queen would have died; there were not enough bees to warm the chilled air spaces inside the mailing cages.
This year, fortunately, the weather has been more favorable for bee work, and yesterday, after I had put the twenty-five queens in their temporary queenery, I was able to go directly to the beeyards and start preparing better homes for some of them.
Queen work is the most exacting part of beekeeping. When I make up nucs I must start with three frames of brood from an established hive, and in order to obtain those three frames I must first locate the queen in the hive I am taking them from to make sure she stays behind. If I were to accidentally put her in the nuc, not only would the parent hive be queenless, but the old queen would kill the new one. The hives now, during warbler time, can contain more than forty thousand bees, and finding the single queen bee can be tricky. It seems daunting to a new beekeeper, but fortunately, with practice, it becomes easier.
Yesterday I looked for queen bees in one of my closest beeyards. It is at the edge of a woods near an old houseplace on a hill. I drove through a cow pasture to get to it, backed up the pickup as near to the hives as I could and unloaded all my empty nucs. I opened the first one and took out all the frames, leaving the feeder in place. Then I removed the lid of the first hive in the row, putting the lid upside down on the ground. I had left the inner cover in place, and carefully pried loose the top hive body from the bottom one with my hive tool. Then I set the top hive body catty-corner across the telescoping cover. If the queen were in it and were to fall off, she would still be on the inverted cover and not on the ground, where she might be lost or get squashed. Now that I had the bottom hive body exposed, I took out the plastic trough feeder and turned it over, checking to see that the queen was not on it, walking around among the worker bees. She was not; I really hadn’t expected her to be. I set the feeder to one side and began taking out the frames, starting with the outermost ones on either side. The frames themselves were empty; the queen was not on them. I set each one beside the feeder on the ground next to the hive. The bees were in such a good mood that even taking apart their home failed to make them angry. The day was sunny, the air was warm, flowers were in bloom everywhere. Most of the older bees—the ones more likely to express hostility about a disruption to their hive, were out foraging for nectar and pollen. When they returned, many of them with yellow, crimson or orange wads of pollen on their hindermost legs, they acted confused. Their hive was in a shambles, their frames spread outside it. They still were not cross, but flew through t
he entrance or the remaining ventilation hole and crawled up inside, appearing bewildered by the unaccustomed condition of their house. Some of the bees from the top hive body had flown back and were circling above the bottom hive body. They seemed disoriented, but they were not aggressive. I had puffed a small amount of smoke into the hive when I first opened it but I had not needed to use any more.
Upper hive body on cover, showing empty nuc and bottom hive body, with combs leaning against them
Even though their mood was good, I tried to work as quickly as I could to bother them as little as possible. I continued to check through the frames, looking for the queen. I pried each frame loose with the hive tool, and then lifted it out with the grips, carefully checking one side and then the other.
The queen is longer and more slender than either worker bees or drones. She walks in what can most accurately, if anthropomorphically, be described as a purposeful way, so the best technique to use looking for her is that of the gestalt. I try to take in the entire frame side at a glance, relying on the eye to pick out the anomalous shape and motion of the queen among the hundreds of bees rather than looking at each part of the frame separately. As one learns to shift from sequential focus to a state of open and alert awareness, the eye gradually gets better at spotting a queen.
The queen was not in the bottom hive body, but I did find a few frames of fresh nectar and pollen there, and, in between them, two frames of eggs and larvae. I set the nectar frames aside and returned the frames with developing brood back to the bottom hive body. As long as I was taking apart the entire hive, I wanted to fill the bottom hive body with as many brood frames as possible, leaving the empty ones above—a tactic that might deter this hive from swarming later on.
The queen had to be in the upper hive body, the one that straddled the inverted cover. I examined the inner cover to see that she was not walking around its underside, then began removing frames, starting with those on the outside. There were many more bees in the upper hive body than in the lower, so I had to be more careful that I didn’t miss the queen. On cold or windy days, the bees bunch and cluster on the frames as soon as they are pulled out, and on such a day the queen could be in the center of any one of the clusters. As a result, when the weather is poor she is usually impossible to find. But yesterday there was no wind, and it was warm enough for the bees to be spread no more than one bee deep on the frames. The top hive body still had last year’s honey in its outermost two frames, and once I was sure the queen was not on them, I put them on the ground beside the ones from the bottom hive body. The seven remaining frames all contained brood, and it was on those I expected to find the queen. She was not on either the first or the second, but I did find her on the third. She was walking along sedately, looking for an empty cell in which she could lay an egg, and was accompanied by the devoted group of workers who follow her everywhere, tending to her needs.
A Book of Bees Page 9
