I carefully put her frame into the bottom hive body, nestling it in with two others so that she wouldn’t be squashed when I reassembled the hive. This hive had plenty of brood to spare; in fact, its general well-being will be improved by taking these three brood frames from it, because it will be less likely to swarm. I placed the three, with many young bees clinging to the sealed brood, in the open nucleus hive, and added one of the frames of honey and pollen to them before filling it with combs from the bottom hive body, all of which had young bees on them. The nuc already had a screen stapled in place barring its entrance, and after I put its inner cover and telescoping cover in place, I taped the ventilation hole shut to secure the bees inside. Then I carried it back to the pickup.
I reassembled the donor hive, giving it mostly empty comb in its second story from the supply that had been inside the nuc. The bees were still confused about the terrible disruption to their quarters, but their mood stayed good. As I closed them up, I could see them bustling about setting things to rights.
I was able to make up seven more nucs from the hives in this yard, even though in two of them the queens had hidden themselves so effectively I was unable to find them. I searched through the combs twice and then gave up, because after a second pass the bees are so completely disturbed that the queen could be anywhere; it simply is not worthwhile to try to find her a third time. But the eight nucs took up all the available space in the bed of my half-ton pickup anyway.
When I arrived back at my own farm, I unloaded the nucs along the roadway to my woodlot, where they would be easy to move again. Then I untaped the ventilation holes, and the bees, out of sorts from the upheaval, flew out and hung in the air in a confused way, trying to make sense of the unfamiliar new landmarks. Some of them were beginning to be cross, and would have stung me had they been able to get through my protective clothing.
I went out in back to my home beeyard, and opened the queenery. I took from it eight queens in their cages and returned to the line of nucs. I smoked the eight to quiet them, and then began handing out their new queens.
I opened the first nuc, smoked the bees down within it and selected one of the queens in her cage. I removed the cover on the sugar-plug end of her cage and poked a hole through the sugar with a nail to make the bees’ job of chewing through it easier. Then I wedged the cage, screenwire-side down, in between two of the inner frames and closed the hive. I repeated the process in the seven other nucs. My part of the work was over. From then on it would be up to the bees.
These bees are cross, and have found nothing agreeable in the day’s events. Many of them still carry a chemical memory of the queen from whose hive they were taken. If I were to open up the queen cage by taking out its cork and give them their new queen directly, they would ball her. As it is, they can’t get at her because the screenwire intervenes. She is of great interest to them, however. Over the next hours and days they will become acquainted with her and her unique pheromone through the screen as they feed her. In addition, they will chew through the sugar plug at her cage’s end, which, in warm sunny weather, may take only a day. Once the plug is gone, the bees are free to get inside the cage and the queen is free to come out. By that time, their hostility should be gone and they should cherish and cosset her. If she has been well mated, and if she has not been harmed in shipping, she will start laying eggs immediately after she comes out of the cage. Sometimes, although to human eyes she looks perfectly fine, the bees will discover some flaw in her, and after she has been free in her own hive for a short time will kill her and raise themselves a new queen from one of the eggs she has laid. Beekeepers call this “premature supersedure,” and it is impossible to predict. I seldom see it, because I order my queens from one of the most reputable of queen breeders, but I know from talking to other beekeepers that premature supersedure is often a problem, particularly with hybrid queens.
Within the species A. mellifera there are a number of races of bees. Those most commonly used in this country are the Caucasian and the Italian. Caucasians tend to be a bit conservative, holding back their spring buildup until the weather is stable, chinking up their hives thoroughly in the autumn to keep out Siberian winds. The Italians—the ones that Lorenzo Langstroth imported and developed—have more exuberant, sunny Mediterranean dispositions. They do not propolize so much, which makes their hives easier to work. They build up rapidly in the springtime (and sometimes starve if the weather turns poor later on and there are no flowers to sustain the burgeoning population). A single sunbeam and a lone wildflower mean springtime to an Italian bee.
Bee breeders have developed many expensive hybrids. They have created strains that are desirable in various ways—color, productivity, gentleness—and for various climates. I experimented with a number of them and found that the hybrids did not supersede truly and that others were not suited for the erratic climate in the Ozarks. I have decided plain Italians are the best for my purposes, and the strains that develop from the supersedure daughters of Italian queens seem admirably suited for local weather conditions. But every beekeeper must experiment for himself to find the breed of bees proper for his methods, his needs and particular climate.
It takes the bees in the nucs several days to settle down and become familiar with their new location. Bees learn precise maps of their territory, taking their bearings and reinforcing their sense of them when they fly out of their hives. I try to disturb them as little as possible during the several days it takes them to learn this new place and while they are at the important business of deciding whether or not they will accept the queen I have given them.
In the meantime, I have been collecting brood and making up nucs from other beeyards. I have emptied out the queenery, giving the twenty-fifth queen to those queenery bees to have for their very own.
After three sunny days the first group of eight nucs seems to have settled down, and I begin checking them to see if the queens have been released from their mailing cages and if they have started their egg-laying careers. In the first one I open, I find the queen still in her cage, and discover that the sugar plug is caked and hard. I enlarge the opening a bit, and return the cage. When I open the second, I am certain all is well. The queen cage has forced the frames apart beyond a bee space, and a small piece of snowy white comb is pendant from it. It is only when bees’ morale is good (and nothing makes their morale better than to be queenright) that they build comb. Sure enough, the queen cage is empty. I set it aside, and pull out one of the center frames. I don’t see the queen, but I don’t need to. Every empty cell contains a glistening white egg—the queen has been accepted, and she is hard at work. I replace the frame, adjust the spaces between the rest of them so that the bee space is respected and close up the hive. I put a stone on top of it to remind myself that it is ready to be moved out, used for requeening or prepared for sale, and continue to check these first eight, all of which are ready except for the one in which the queen had remained in her cage.
This past winter, I have taken orders for ten new hives of bees from people who wanted to get started with an established hive in the spring with as little risk and work as possible. In a few days, I have ten nucs in which the queens have a good egg-laying pattern so I bring ten more hive bodies out to the row. I feed each of the ten a full ration of sugar syrup and put a second hive body in place on each one. Every other day over the next several weeks, I’ll feed those ten hives again. At the end of that time, the queen, responding to the bees’ extra feed, will have moved up and begun laying eggs in the upper hive body. The bees, aided by the combination of extra feed and plentiful flower bloom, begin to store nectar and pollen there too.
When I decide the new young hives are strong enough to manage on their own, I telephone the customers who have bought them and we arrange an evening convenient for both of us when they can drive out to pick up their bees. The hives are all stapled, and I have left the moving screens in place on each one. When the new owners arrive at dusk after the field bees have
returned home, all that remains to do is to tape shut the ventilation holes and help load the hives on the customers’ pickups.
These customers are people new to beekeeping, and need advice. I tell them to feed the bees a time or two more while the bees are learning yet another new location, and to watch the weather and flower bloom in case they need to be fed later on. I recommend a book about bees to read. I tell them how to set the hives up on boards with a forward tilt to allow moisture to run out. I advise them to face their hive toward the southeast. I tell them the bees will need shade and water to drink and for cooling. New beekeepers usually have questions, and we often talk bees on into the evening.
Last spring, I began listening to myself talk and noticed what I sound like. I sound like a mother relinquishing her firstborn to the kindergarten teacher. I sound like a writer handing her manuscript to her editor. I sound like a Republican tax assessor turning over the job to a Democrat.
I don’t need to add hives, I remind myself. My bees already produce more honey than I can sell. I can’t keep every colony of bees I start. I can’t, but I want to.
The second batch of twenty-five queens came into the local post office on Tuesday, which meant that they had spent the weekend in the mails somewhere, and after I picked them up I worked fast with them. When they are temporarily imprisoned in cages they are as dependent on me as any domestic animal might be for its well-being. Although we interfere with bees’ breeding, talk of them as though they are domesticated and keep them in manmade hives, bees are wild animals and, like any wild animals, need to be free to live. Strictly speaking one never “keeps” bees—one comes to terms with their wild nature. I had to restore their freedom and independence as soon as I could.
The week the second batch of queens comes is always the busiest of the spring for me. I have to take brood from established hives to set up nucs, as I did the previous week, and the second shipment takes more time, because the hives are more populous and the old queens are therefore harder to find. In addition, I have to move the nucs established the week before into permanent locations.
My goal each spring is to have all hives in place at least half a week before the blackberries bloom and give the first major nectar flow—usually in the early part of May. In other parts of the country, the first strong nectar flow will come from other flowers and a beekeeper must learn to recognize whatever plants produce it and have his hives well established by the time they bloom.
The week has been a frantic one. I have been starting work earlier in the mornings than usual and staying out in the beeyards later than it is entirely comfortable to do with bees, working long past the time when the field worker bees have begun to come home for the day. I have not had time to go to the grocery store, and my refrigerator is empty. There are piles of dirty socks, and bee suits lie where I have stepped out of them. Late in the evening, friends telephone and say, “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you all day,” and then kindly invite me to dinner because they suspect I am not eating properly.
In the course of opening hives out in the beeyards to take brood for the new nucs, I found a queenless colony in which the worker bees had started to lay eggs. “Laying workers,” as they are called, are a curious biological phenomenon. They seem to be one of nature’s mistakes.
In what is called a “queenright” colony, the queen is constantly being fed and touched by worker bees, and in the process she passes on to them her own unique chemical marker or pheromone which is called “queen substance” by beekeepers. In turn, the worker bees feed one another and pass along traces of this pheromone as they share out food. The feeding is continuous and instinctive. A bee with an empty crop approaches another and thrusts her proboscis between the mouth parts of her sister. This begging behavior triggers a donor response in any bee who has food in her own crop, and she will immediately start to feed her sister. Both bees stroke one another’s antennae in the process. One researcher, J. B. Free, found that a bee’s antennae were the most important part of her anatomy and essential in making bees feed one another. Bees who have lost their antennae are less often fed. Free also found that donor bees would try to feed freshly severed bee heads that had intact antennae, or even small balls of cotton with tiny wires sticking out of them that looked vaguely like antennae, to other bees.
This constant feeding is a form of chemical communication, and one of the messages it allows the queen to say is “Queen here. Queen here. Queen here.” As long as she keeps “talking,” the ovaries of the worker bees stay undeveloped. But if something happens to the queen bee, the inhibition on the workers’ egg-producing organs is gone.
Some disaster had taken the queen in the laying worker colony I found. Perhaps the bees had raised a supersedure queen to replace a failing one, and a swallow or kingbird had snatched up the virgin on her mating flight. Whatever it was, the hive had no queen and no eggs fresh enough to raise another. When this happens, a colony usually dwindles and dies out, but sometimes, for reasons that are poorly understood, the ovaries in one or several worker bees begin to develop.
These worker bees have never been on a mating flight and have no instinct urging them to do so, but the eggs within their ovaries ripen and they lay them in the cells of comb within the hive. Because they are not queens, they are not very good at laying eggs. They often lay several in one cell, then skip a few cells and lay again. They are shorter than queens, and so they often lay their eggs against the side of the cell rather than at the bottom. And of course, since they have never mated, the eggs are sterile, contain only half the required genetic material and will develop into drones.
When I discovered this hive a few days ago I was sure it was a laying worker colony as soon as I opened it, because there were entirely too many drones in it. During this time of year there are always some drones in every hive, for the queen can choose, when she wants to, to lay unfertilized eggs that will develop into drones. In the spring and early summer, they are regarded in a kindly way by worker bees, and are free to drift from hive to hive. They often make my job of finding the queen more difficult, because my eye has learned to pick out the anomalous shape on each frame and it immediately registers the big, fat, furry drones who are a distinct and small minority in most hives. But in this laying worker hive they were not an anomaly. They were in the majority.
Worker and drone sealed brood
I took out several frames and found eggs scattered haphazardly throughout them. The bigger drone larvae will hatch from these eggs. When the larvae pupate, the sealed cells bulge convexly from the surface of the comb in sharp contrast to the sealed worker brood, whose cells, in a queenright colony remain flush with the face of the comb. But there was no worker brood present in this colony at all. All sealed cells bulged outward and promised more male bees to come. There was no honey left, and little fresh nectar. Worker bees normally live about six weeks; without new young ones to grow up and replace them, the dwindling numbers of aging workers in this hive had to work harder and harder to support the increasing number of drones. It is difficult not to look at all this in anthropomorphic terms—to feel sympathy for the dutiful workers and a twinge of resentment at the greedy drones. This would be a mistake. The morale of the worker bees in a laying worker colony is surprisingly good. The remaining bees, despite the fact that their colony is doomed, are as contented with their laying workers as they would be with a queen. They will ball and kill any real queen a beekeeper tries to give them. Beekeepers consider them impossible to requeen and the usual advice is to dump out the last bees and take away the empty hive, but I have found a way to take advantage of this high state of morale and to create a productive hive out of it.
When I find a laying worker hive, I return as soon as possible, the next day if I can, with one of the queenright nucs I have created. When I get to the beeyard, I first move the laying worker hive a short distance away. Then I put the queenright nuc in its place, untape its ventilation hole and unscreen its entrance. The bees in th
e nuc are confused. They fly around, wonder where they are. The field bees from the queenless hive are also confused, but they return to their old location with loads of nectar for their drones, and any bee, no matter what her chemical identity, who flies into a hive heavy with nectar during fine weather is rarely challenged by guard bees, especially those who are unsure of their new surroundings. I leave the nuc undisturbed for a few minutes while I take apart the laying worker hive. I try to disrupt them thoroughly, to make them less sure of themselves on this their home turf. Some frames still have bees clinging to them, and I rap them smartly on the ground to dislodge the bees. Startled, they fly up in the air and gradually, a few at a time, go back to the original location where the queenright nuc now sits. Their morale is momentarily so reduced that they will not harm the queen. I put together all the remaining frames that contain nectar and drone brood. I consolidate them into a single hive body, and give it to the nucleus hive as its second story.
I alter my records to show the state of this new hive, and leave the bees to sort themselves out. I have found that these hives always tend to be extremely productive. The nucleus hive is reinforced by the remaining worker bees from the laying worker colony, who maintain a high morale. The drones from that colony will be tolerated by the bees in this outyard for a month or so. Some may mate with virgin queens and others, after their time of usefulness is past, will be excluded from any hive they try to enter. I have given these bees a beekeeperly nudge and put them back on their proper biological track. A hive that would have died out has been encouraged to assimilate with another, and both will prosper more than had each remained apart.
A Book of Bees Page 10