The Empty Queen Cell.

Initially, I thought that at last something was going right for the bees; the first hive that I opened today had this newly vacated queen cell which means that there is a nice young virgin queen running around. There’s no point trying to find her, she’ll be slim and fast so the chance of seeing her is slight and she’ll be raring to go. The less disturbance, the less chance there is for things to go wrong. Not for her a long and happy marital relationship; once she has become sexually mature in about a week, she will spend another week going out on mating flights whenever the weather is suitable and behaving like a veritable Messalina, mating with as many drones as she can manage before leading a life of absolute celibacy. When I first started bee keeping, I was told she would mate a few times, later on it became a handful and then a dozen; these days the number stands at about twenty but I can’t be certain that it isn’t still rising. The next inspection will not be until I see pollen being taken into the hive, a sure sign that brood is being raised.
 
The second hive I opened, the bees had pulled down the queen cell I’d given them last week; so had the third but – they had produced two queen cells of their own, both with a juicy maggot inside – that suggests that there is a failing queen who is being superseded – strange but satisfactory. Were they wishing to swarm, there would have been many more.
 
The fourth hive was o.k. and the fifth, which appears not to have had a queen for a couple of months was its usual bad-tempered self and I was planning to unite it with a nicer one.
 
It was the last hive that shocked me; most of the bees were dead. Thankfully, I’ve never seen this before and I don’t want to again. I wondered about disease or poisoning, there’s a lot of talk about pesticides at the moment, but it was when I saw a patch of cells with the bottoms of dead bees poking out that the truth dawn on me. Starvation! Last week, I saw no need to inspect them, all was going well so I just let them be, but the signs would have been there. Attempts to feed all of the colonies so far this year have just resulted in the feed fermenting and being thrown away, so I gave up. Obviously, that was not the right choice.
 
Starving bees, unsurprisingly, are very lethargic, so it’s no good just sticking food on top of the hive, they can’t reach it. The answer is to use a small garden spray to cover the bees in a mist of sugar syrup; only this morning I had placed an exhausted bumble bee on a saucer with a drop of honey by its head and watched the magic of an insect coming back to life and flying away, a process that took a matter of minutes. It was the same with the colony of honey bees. Taking the hive apart, spraying the dying bees as I went, pouring heaps of dead and dying bees off the hive floor into a tray and spraying them, I again saw the magic with live bees extricating themselves from the pile of corpses while those still crawling about in on the frames were becoming more active. As I reassembled the hive it slowly came to life. Then, while its neighbours were putting themselves to bed, this colony set about foraging for some necessity of life, probably water for their air conditioning system and the world didn’t feel quite so bad.
 
I’ve been given to much contemplation this evening, even Mrs TD commented on it; it would seem that I’ve been missing the bleedin’ obvious for some time. I’ve long been aware that bees do not use capital to build honeycomb, they use income; it needs nectar coming into the hive for them to make wax, they won’t use stored honey – that is their emergency food supply. The same must be true of other activities, it’s just that I’ve never really thought about it and I’ve never read it nor heard it stated. They need income to raise brood, that includes raising queens; I’ve just never experienced it before.
 
The bee keeping world is full of stories about the “June gap,” a dearth of forage, usually due to a lack of rainfall. While the Penicuik June hasn’t exactly been dry, it may well be that there has been a shortage of nectar, and the bees have had insufficient forage to behave normally. Armed with these thoughts, I shall be taking the feeders out of storage in the morning and making up plenty of sugar syrup.