Return of the Queen
by Sue Gessler
After our swarm on Shabbat 7th July - waking up to a cloud of bees in the sky above the hive - our hive had been resolutely empty of any larvae or brood of any description. We had checked and found extremely neat and shiny empty cells throughout the brood box. And our supers had some honey in but many frames with empty comb- the bees had drawn out comb but nothing was in it. Every wet day they stay home and eat their stores- and they need a lot to keep going.
We had also noticed that the level of bee activity was much lower - they just seemed to be pottering rather than the highly active level that they had previously been at, both the foraging bees that flew out of the hive and those within it when we looked. Perhaps not surprisingly - all those nurse bees with nothing to do! It all seemed rather miserable, but we decided that we had to trust to the bees to raise a queen - after all, that was what they had done to get a swarm in the first place. On the 14th July we looked - no queen - no brood - but queens hatch faster than workers. By the 17th, we looked and found 3 sealed queen cells, two at the bottom of the frame hanging like an elongated olive, with lots of bees clustering over and around it - and amazingly, one queen cell which had been opened and reclosed. We could see the dark body of the queen inside, and the lid of the cell had been neatly cut - as if along a dotted line- and then folded back over, rather like a cigarette packet. This is the workers ‘penning’ in the new queen, feeding her and waiting for the others to hatch before they decide on the best candidate. So we had to trust.
Next time we looked - still no queen to see, no eggs, babies. Our bee-keeping tutor Brian replied tersely to emails: it takes over 3 weeks for a queen to be mated and begin to lay. Be patient. We had lots of drones to escort her up to the mating areas- we think over Hampstead Heath - and we kept hoping.
Yesterday (12th August) we examined the hive. We couldn’t see any queen. We began as usual with the outside frames - clean and empty - then some with capped honey at the top with its white wax bulge over each cell - and as we came to the inner frames we suddenly saw an enormous ellipse covering almost the whole frame of brown capped cells, quite different from honey. Was it really brood? We looked at the next frame. The same solid elongated circle, just like the illustrations in the bee books. The odd cell dotted throughout was empty, where we thought bees had hatched. And then, as we looked, we saw something move on the surface- the lid of a cell moved, erupted in a very tiny way into small flakes , and as we watched, a bee emerged, backwards- and immediately walked off into the group of other bees, still covered on her abdomen with tiny flakes of wax.
So we now have 4 frames of brood- and if they are hatching now, we must have had a laying queen 21 days ago, on 22nd July. So perhaps that ‘penned’ queen that we glimpsed on 17th July was the one who was chosen- or perhaps there was another older queen who had been there all along. Our hope is that they can hatch out enough to get good and strong for the winter. We know we’ll have to feed them this winter as they are so short of stores, but if they can make a good and strong nucleus to get through the winter, we’ll be happy.
