To Kill a Queen

Now doesn't that sound like a great title for a murder mystery! No, I am quitting my "day job" to take up writing - nothing so exciting as that. But, it is how I spent my Easter!

It is that time of year when you need to get rid of the "old" bee queens and replace them with "new" queens. My "new" queens finally came in the mail on Saturday. It was so funny. I had to go pick them up at the Post Office. They were in a big envelope in a HUGE bin marked LIVE BEES off in a corner. Trust me, there was no way these queens were getting out of that envelope.

Anyway, you have to kill the old queens in order to put in the new queens. Kind of reminded me of life. Here the "old" queen spends a year laying literally thousands and thousands of eggs, taking care of the hive and all the worker bees, making honey, etc. Then what happens - she gets squashed and replaced by a "sweet young thing."

Finding the old queen is no easy matter. You have to go through each frame of the hive and search through thousands of buzzing bees. She is usually easy to spot because she is larger and longer than a normal bee. The interesting thing is that once she has been killed, "word" spreads fairly quickly through the hive that the queen is gone because the "tone" in the hive definitely takes on a different pitch (and it is not a happy one!).

The new queen is in a small cage that has a hole filled with sugar blocking the hole. That cage is place on top of one of frames. The bees in the hive will eat through the sugar to release the new queen. By the time the queen is released, everyone is used to the new queen and all is well in hive. If the new queen were released immediately after the death of the old queen, the bees would have killed her.

I also found out something interesting . . . bees (at least, my bees) don't like plastic frames. Every single plastic frame in my hive the bees are building their combs incorrectly. Kent, my friend the beekeeper, is at a loss why they are doing this. So I have had to buy almost all new wooden frames and wax foundations, plus new hive boxes because they are running out of room. No one told me beekeeping was so expensive! So it looks like our honey production this year won't be as good as we thought, but next year it should be really good!