Phil Craft Hive Craft

With all the swarming we’e been seeing this year our hives are busy producing new queens. I’ve written already this spring about my concerns of the replacement of queens in my hives. What follows is a brief article on the process of queen rearing by our bees.

It starts with queen cells
The first stage in the queen process is the creation of a special cell in which the queen will be reared, called a queen cell. There are three different kinds of queen cells, which are classified based on why the bees are producing new queens (and they rarely try to make just one queen at a time). These are: swarm cells; supersedure cells; and emergency cells.

Swarm cells and supersedure cells are both the result of the planned production of queens due to the hive preparing to swarm or sensing a need for a new queen because the current one is failing. These cells are made by the bees for the sole purpose of rearing a queen and in the beginning are called “queen cups.” The queen lays eggs in these cells and, from the start, the larvae hatched from these eggs are destined to be queens. The cells are a signal to the nurse bees to feed the larvae within the diet of royal jelly, which will cause them to develop into queens.

Emergency cells are the result of the hive suddenly losing a queen or of the queen being no longer capable of laying fertile eggs. In this case, the bees choose a very young larva in a worker cell, expand the cell, and start feeding her large amounts of royal jelly. How young the chosen larva is when a queen diet is commenced will greatly affect the quality of the queen reared. While it is possible for very good queens to be produced from emergency cells, this is not always the case. Beekeepers whose goal is to yield superior queens will mimic conditions that produce swarm or supersedure queens. Placing frames of eggs into a queenless hive will result in emergency queen cells and is not a method by which to attempt to consistently rear high-quality queens.

Feeding of the larvae
For the first two days after hatching, larvae destined to be queens and those that will become workers are fed the same diet. At that point, those in queen cells are fed larger amounts of food, more frequently, and of a special kind – royal jelly. Both royal jelly and the food fed to workers contain secretions from the worker bees’ mandibular glands, but royal jelly contains a much higher concentration of these secretions. Larvae become queens as a result of this special diet and the larger quantity of food consumed. This transformation of eggs containing exactly the same genetic material into two very different insects truly is one of the wonders of nature.

Pupae development and emergence
The queen cells are capped about five to six days after hatching as compared to seven to eight for worker larvae. Change from larvae to adults occurs over a period of about seven days during the pupal stage. At that point, the new queens eat their way out of the cells and emerge as virgin queens.

Mating
New queens will instinctively seek out and destroy other queens, including those still in their cells. Hence, when rearing queens, it is very important to separate queen cells prior to emergence or risk losing all but one queen. About four days after emerging, new queens will make one or more orientation flights. Mating flights (one or more) occur about 10 days after emergence. Mating must occur within about three weeks after emergence; after that, the new queen may commence laying eggs without benefit of mating and will lay only unfertilized eggs (drones). It is thought that queens that do not mate within about 14 days of emerging will be inferior. Queens may mate with about 10 to 15 drones on the mating flights, but numbers reported by scientists vary.

An additional important factor that influences the success of a honey bee colony’s production of queens is the season of the year. While bees may produce queens during any month with warm daytime temperatures (in Kentucky, this is from March or early April through October), their success rate is much higher April through June – the same time of year when swarm cells are most likely to be produced. During these months, we see warm temperatures, good nectar and pollen flows, and strong colony populations. All these conditions are also those that are optimum for swarming.

When I began writing posts for this webpage, I warned those reading that might digress from the science and art of beekeeping from time to time. I do so now to some degree.

While returning from a beekeeping meeting in southern Kentucky last night, I was listening to Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (a book on CD).  This volume is taken from Twain’s life on and along the river, including a stint as a riverboat pilot. In the following lines he describes a gathering of visiting pilots on the boat he was working on. I thought of beekeepers when listening to these words.

They were likewise welcome because all pilots are tireless talkers, when gathered together, and as they talk only about the river they are always understood and are always interesting. Your true pilot cares nothing about anything on earth but the river, and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings.

I re-wrote this in my head after listening to Twain’s words as:

They were likewise welcome because all beekeepers are tireless talkers, when gathered together, and as they talk only about the bees and the art of beekeeping they are always understood and are always interesting. Your true beekeeper cares nothing about anything on earth but the bees, and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings.

I don’t think I’m the only beekeeper who goes to meetings (when I am not part of the program), less to listen to the speakers than for the opportunity of conversation with other beekeepers.

While in St. Louis last week, I visited the educational apiary of the Eastern Missouri Beekeepers Association (EMBA) with my friend Bob Sears, who is president of the association and was involved in establishing their apiary several years ago. Along with beekeeping classes, schools, and mentoring programs, association apiaries are, I’m convinced, an invaluable service that beekeeping associations can offer their members.

Easterm Missouri Beekeepers Assoc. Educational apiary

The Eastern Missouri beekeepers have developed an integrated educational program for new beekeepers, comprised of all of the programs I listed above. The association apiary is key to offering hands on instruction to the members, especially newer ones.  While it is possible to use members’ hives and apiaries in beekeeper education (as many groups do through Saturday afternoon field days), logically and educationally, it is far better to have a bee yard that is dedicated to education and is owned and maintained by the association. Continue reading →

I returned last night from a quick trip to St. Louis for a tour of the University of Missouri in St. Louis, where the July 12-14, Heartland Apicultural Society (HAS) will be held. I had not previously visited the conference site, and I was very pleased with the facilities. Virtually all of the conference activities will take place at the J.C. Penney Conference Center, with the exception of the labs and apiary, which will both be within about 200 yards of the center.

I also met with a group of St. Louis beekeepers who will be organizing many of the conference activities. The energy level of this group is very high and I am looking forward to the conference. Progress on the program is on going, but some of the speakers who are planning to join us and whose names you will recognize are:  Jim Tew, Kim Flottum, Greg Hunt, Tom Webster, Michael Bush, and Stu Jacobson. I‘ll have more names for you soon. The popular queen rearing course will once again be part of the conference program. Watch the HAS webpage for speaker and program details. I hope to have a pre-registration form available for download from the site in the next week.

I spent yesterday afternoon pulling and then extracting eight supers of honey. This is the earliest in the season I have ever harvested honey, and I could have taken this off at least a week ago. The honey is extremely light in color, the result of a heavy black locust bloom, the best in years, and of Asian bush honeysuckle, an invasive exotic shrub which is common here.

I’m off to St. Louis this morning to visit the University of Missouri in St. Louis, the planned site of this summer’s Heartland Apicultural Society Conference. Watch the HAS webpage for upcoming new information about this summer’s conference.

I’ll start this post by saying that this an unusual spring here in Kentucky, so my beekeeping is a little off kilter. In more typical years, I put honey supers on in early to mid-April and do not see substantial nectar and honey storage until late April. This year, due to the mild winter and a spring that appeared to start in February, I put honey supers (with drawn comb) on in mid-March. That was a little early but, as you know, I was headed to the far side of the world on March 15^th,  and I knew the supers would be needed earlier than usual. When I returned in early April, these hives were overflowing with bees and were already storing large amounts of nectar. I promptly added every super I had onto the hives. By mid-April I had some supers full of honey and now have hives with two supers or more each, full and capped. Next week I’m pulling them and extracting honey. That gives you an idea of the nectar flow here, but the story I was leading up to is the swarming. Continue reading →