At The Boojum Beeyard: June and July

What have you been up to for summer vacation? Have you been observing the bee activities around you? What have you seen? You can comment and tell us all about it!

The Boojum Bees have been quite busy while school’s been out for summer! All the colonies are thriving and the hives are getting heavy with honey.

Also this summer, I had to re-queen a hive. Re-queening involves taking out the old queen and letting the colony be queenless for a couple days, then slowly introducing a new queen bee. There are a few different reasons for a beekeeper to have to do this. Maybe the queen is old and not producing eggs as well as she should, or maybe the beekeeper simply wants to try keeping a new breed of honeybee. Or, as is commonly the case here in the Southwestern United States, the colony becomes aggressive (possibly Africanized) and hostile.

This colony had become very aggressive. By introducing a new queen, the new brood would also be like her. They would have the same genetics and therefore be just like the new queen. There are many different breeds of honeybees. There are Italian honeybees, Russian, Carniolan, Yugo, and many others. All of them have different attributes, or strengths and weaknesses. For instance, Italian honeybees are very commonly used for beginning beekeeping, as they are some of the calmest honeybees around, produce well, and they readily build comb. Russian honeybees may be a little more aggressive, but they have more resistance to mites and cold weather.

I turned to Beesource for help. This online community of beekeepers is a wealth of information and support, simply a wonderful resource. I was immediately contacted by Barry, who on behalf of Beesource, wanted to help our program. Beesource collaborated with Koehnen & Sons who generously donated a beautiful Cordovan Italian queen to us. How wonderful was that? Thanks again, guys, you made it possible!

So the next step was to remove the old queen from the hive. Suited, I used the smoker to smoke the hive liberally. After a few minutes, I removed the lid from the hive body. Immediately guard bees “bumped” me, testing me, the intruder. I applied more smoke. Instead of the normal bee behavior I’ve seen, like falling down into the hive and starting to drink their fill of honey, these bees boiled up out of the hive. I quickly began to work. I pulled the first frame out of the hive body and held it up, looking for the queen. Frame after frame I searched without any luck.

And now this colony was very upset with me. By the time I had looked at each of the ten frames, the bees had started finding chinks in my armor. I hadn’t worn anything more than a veil, jacket, jeans, and boots. This was far more protection than I usually wore while tending hives, but it wasn’t quite enough this day. I was being stung around my ankles, but I wasn’t about to quit and come back later. It took another twenty minutes methodically searching all ten frames before I finally found the queen hidden between some burr comb and the frame foundation.

I put her in a jar, put all the frames back in the hive, and closed it back up.  I took the queen and left the beeyard surrounded by a cloud of bees. I walked around until most of the bees had given up the barrage of defense. Now the old, aggressively natured queen was gone and her special pheromones would start fading away. Without the smell of their queen, the colony would become more agitated. Worker bees do not like being without a queen, for the colony will die without her. When the old queen’s scent is gone, the workers will be more likely to accept the new queen as their own.

A day later the gorgeous new golden colored Cordovan Italian queen bee arrived. Cordovan is a genetic trait that includes gentleness, comb building skills, and coloration that makes it easier to identify her majesty. She was shipped in a tiny cage with several attendants. One end of the cage had a hole plugged with a cork and sugar. It was time to put her in the hive. And this time I put on a lot more protection. Again I opened the hive and found two brood frames. I removed the small cork from the hole in the new queen’s cage. Now all that was blocking the queen from getting out of the cage was the sugar.

I wedged the small cage in between the two frames that had open brood. That means the larvae were still developing and hadn’t been capped over to pupate yet. I put the frames with the queen’s cage back into the hive and closed it back up. It would take awhile for the workers to eat through the “door” of hard sugar. By the time they did chew through, the colony would be used the new queen’s particular scent. The colony would accept her as their queen.

Time to wait; the old queen’s brood would finish maturing and the new queen would begin to lay eggs. We waited ten days before checking to see if the new queen had been accepted by the colony and whether she was laying eggs yet. And indeed she had. We removed the empty cage and observed all the signs that the colony had a new queen. After a month, the old workers would begin to die naturally and the new, calmer and gentler brood would be maturing and taking over all the jobs of a healthy Cordovan Italian colony.