Posted in food, honeybees on October 18, 2010| Leave a Comment »
The queen must die, we decided this weekend.
Hive #1 has been our best hive for a couple of years. This year, our first year to harvest honey, we took 5 supers off that single hive, a little more than 10 gallons. It’s the towering “beescraper” on the left, below. By mid-July when we harvested, we added yet another deep body to the stack so that the bees wouldn’t swarm for lack of space. We named the queen Imelda because we imagined that the queen of such a massive bee city would have a lot of shoes in her bee closet. It has been a mega-city, a bee-tropolis. But today, we planned to kill the queen.
We’ve been going through the hives lately to make sure they’re adequately prepared for winter, and we found that hive #1 had no eggs or small brood, a sign that the queen had failed. (Eventually, she just runs out of eggs.) Usually, the bees take care of succession themselves, starting a new queen when the old one begins to falter, but it’s too late this season for them to manage, so we planned to pick up a new queen Monday. First, though, we’d have to assassinate Imelda so that her workers would be ready to transfer their allegiance.
I was reluctant to re-queen the hive–I’d much rather let the bees raise one of her daughters since she clearly has good genetics. So we were very pleased to find two frames full of Imelda’s eggs and small brood this afternoon–and Imelda herself, still fat and glowing.
Guess she just got back from summer vacation. No sign of her shoes, though.
Kirsten Eve Beachy 