Mystery of the sugar momma that flew the coop

That's right, sugar 'momma'....

You see honey bee hives are in fact a teeming city of nearly identical sisters working under the guidance of their queen. A few male drones are produced to add genetic diversity in and around other hives for reproduction, but make no mistake this is a female dominated society and the queen bee runs the show. She is the real sugar momma.

I'm here with Becca and her mom as they try to unravel a mystery. You see a few days previous there was a swarm! Think of thousands of bees swarming in a dense cloud of ferocious buzzing like something out of a Hitchcock film. Scary for some, but for me it is simply fascinating and I'm all ears learning about bee society. It turns out a swarm is when the hive decides to jump ship and pioneer a new society. This usually happens for one of two reasons, (1) the hive is full and congested having filled all of its cells with eggs, honey, and brood, essentially a full house, or (2) the queen is not producing enough eggs to keep up with her colony, usually an older queen. When this happens the bees might premeditate a swarm sometimes weeks ahead of time and at the right moment swarm as at least one of these hives did last week.

For the beekeeper this means they've been caught snoozing and they just lost a lot of honey production by not adding space to the hive or replacing an old queen. It also means you have to wrangle the new hive back, bee wrangling! Luckily they gorge on honey before swarming and as Becca's mom put it, "they have set their sights on moving so they are pretty docile to move around."

So here we are opening each hive to figure out which of them swarmed so we can keep tabs and add in more frames to produce honey. In our bee suits we look like astronauts surrounded by tiny projectile UFO's buzzing to and fro in single minded pursuit as we carefully pull out frames heavy with glistening honey and shiny bodies. Uncovering each hive we disturbed many a busy annoyed worker, drooled over many cells brimming with tangerine nectar, and finally solved the mystery of the sugar momma that flew the coop....