Queen Bee

Yesterday I spent much time sorting out my petrol strimmer and attacking the nettles and weeds around the edge of the vegetable plot. It's the only area I am allowed to tidy up in the garden, the rest is Angie's contribution to  "nature". I am though thinking of rebellion, the idea of the millions of thistle seeds blowing in the wind in a week or two are filling me with horror.

However, I stuck to the bees today and was sure I would be harvesting copious amounts of honey. The bees had other ideas. There was at the very best two frames I could have used perhaps enough for one jar and certainly not enough to even consider getting all the equipment out. So I left them.

Not even the strongest colony which I had put an extra box of "honey only" frames on was anywhere near getting filled up. Not a single frame was even fully built with the wax frame.

Instead, the girls are concentrating fully on making "brood" frames, which are the ones that the queen fills with eggs and ensures the next generation. Understandable when one knows a worker bee only lives 6 weeks in summer before it dies of exhaustion.

My plan is now to simply forget a summer honey supply and hope that the numbers will be sufficient to make it a bumper "honeydew" season which will start soon.

I thought it might be interesting to show some of what the Queen Bee does. I have the luck that the two hives I initially got (now doubled "thanks" to swarming) had Queens who had been marked with a little drop of paint. Universally, beekeepers have a colour system. As a Queen bee lives no more than 5 years, there are 5 colours used in sequence to show the birth year. That way a beekeeper can a) spot the Queen quickly and b) when she is getting older and the "performance" is falling, he can determine the age and consider replacing her with a young Queen. 2017 the colour was yellow.

In the top photo, one can see her very clearly. Although my eyesight is dreadful at the moment as I have a full blown sty(e) on one eye and constant weeping of both, I probably would have spotted this one even if she wasn't marked as there were few bees around her. Commonly she is surrounded by hundreds and it is a very tough job to find her amongst the 30-50,000 bees in an average hive.

In the middle photo is the other Queen in another hive and again easily seen to the trained eye. Just to prove it, the bottom photo is a close up of the same photo.

The photos also show some of the activity on the brood frames which generally consist of stored honey (food) around the outer edges in an arch-like form. On the right of the middle photo, you can see some shining cells which contain still fluid honey which hasn't yet been completely filled and is not yet at the right moisture level to seal with a thin layer of wax (Bees will fan the honey with their wings to help dry it). On the very left of the same photo, you can see some sealed darkish transparent honey cells and next to them some light coloured ones which are sealed cells but containing an egg and thus later the grub that will become a bee. In the top photo, you can see some white cells with the eggs with all that the grub needs to grow before it bites it's way out through the wax seal to start its life.

Male (drone) bee cells have a larger size and one tends to encourage the bees to build separate frames just for them which one then destroys - as we all know men are expendable as the Queen only needs them once in her lifetime, they are a pointless waste of food and space. (No reference here to any Conservative MP who saved me any thought of being prosecuted for my intimate photos today).

I didn't spot the other two unmarked Queen bees and am a bit concerned one hive might be Queenless. I need to "keep an eye out" and hope the sty goes soon.