Multiple Mating Flights, Multiple Mates

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Until the middle of the 20th Century, scientists believed that queen bees took only one mating flight in their lifetime.  It wasn’t until the 1940’s that a scientist who was studying queen bee mating behavior discovered that queen bees take multiple mating flights.  The scientist (Roberts, 1944) determined that the number of mating flights ranged from one to five.  It took another ten years or so for another scientist (Woke, 1955) to postulate and prove that queen bees not only take multiple mating flights, but also mate with multiple drones during this flights.

We now know that queen bees mate with approximately 10 to 20 drones, typically over the course of several flights.  Why so many flights and drones?  By spreading the mating process both over time and over multiple drones, the queen limits the probability that she will mate with a drone that shares the same sex alleles.  This varied mating program minimizes the chances of inbreeding and maximizes the chances for “hybrid vigor.”

From Egg To Honeybee – An Amazing 21 Days

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It boggles the mind to think that in a mere 21 days, an egg can become a tiny larva, then a pupa, and then a worker honeybee.

From Egg to Worker Honey Bee:

  • Day 0:  The worker bees clean out a cell of honeycomb and the queen bee lays a fertilized egg in it.
  • Days 1 to 3:  The egg sits in a honeycomb cell kept warm (approximately 93º Fahrenheit) amidst the brood nest.  It will lose approximately 30% of its weight during this incubation period.
  • Day 4:  The egg hatches into a larva.
  • Days 4 to 9:  The nurse bees feed the larva worker jelly (produced by the glands of nurse bees), and later pollen and honey, continuing to keep the larva warm and moist.  The larva eats between 150 to 800 times per day, growing at an astonishing speed.
  • Day 9:  The larva now weighs approximately 900 times the weight of the original egg!
  • Day 9:  The worker bees seal the larva.  The larva is now about to become a pre-pupa.
  • Days 10-21:  The pre-pupa goes through tremendous changes over these 12 days, becoming a pupa, and gradually taking the shape of a bee.  The skin of the pupa darkens near the end of this process and on the final day . . .
  • Day 21:  A bee emerges.  We think of this as a day old bee, but it really is a 21 day-old insect.

The Syrup Factory

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Sometimes honeybee colonies consume more of their honey supplies than they bring in.  During times of drought or seasons when plants are not blooming, bees can be in danger of starving unless they are fed.  Supplemental sugar syrup (sucrose) feeding is an ideal way to keep a colony’s weight from declining dangerously.

Many commercial beekeepers feed high fructose corn syrup, or various custom blends of sucrose and fructose, that are delivered in enormous tanker trucks.  Most small-scale beekeepers, however, simply mix sugar and hot water in a bucket to make a few gallons of syrup at a time.

A strong colony can consume a gallon of sugar syrup in approximately 1 or 2 days!  Each gallon of thick sugar syrup (of approximately a 2:1 ratio of sugar to water) adds approximately 7 lbs. of weight to a colony.

Raising queen honeybees also requires a great deal of syrup.  The quality of queen bees is directly proportional to the quantity and consistency of food that is coming in.  Conscientious queen breeders feed to the maximum, not only syrup, but syrup and pollen substitutes, leaving nothing to chance, and keeping the entire queen rearing operation well fed at all times.

Gentle Bees

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Gentle Bees

This week, with the August temperatures climbing into the high nineties, our queen harvesters just couldn’t take the heat anymore and took off all of their protective gear! Now, we do not recommend beekeeping without smoke or a veil, but that’s what we did. The smoker was put away because it causes the queens to run too much, making them challenging to catch. The veils came off because of the extreme heat. And the result?

The gentle bees took it all in stride.

Final tally of the day:  No smoke, no veil, no gloves, and . . . no stings!

Wildflower Meadows Queen Rearing Process and Mating

To Find A Queen Bee

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Finding a lone queen bee in a large booming beehive of possibly a hundred thousand bees can be a challenge of epic proportions.  Even in a small colony, the queen sometimes seems to be nowhere to be found.  The good news is that the vast majority of beekeeping does not require a direct search for a queen.  Most beekeepers learn to read the condition of a queen by focusing on her brood and its distribution, rather than by searching for the queen directly.

Occasionally however, when it is time to replace her, a queen bee needs to be found.   In our queen bee rearing yards we typically search for queens all day long.   After a while, our beekeepers quickly learn the essential tricks of the trade:

  • It is a time saver – in the long run – to immediately check the lid as soon as it is opened
  • It is best to first remove a side frame to clear space for handling the other frames
  • The percentage play is the middle of brood nest, so it is more efficient to work from the inside out
  • The less smoke the better, since smoke makes the bees (and the queen) scatter from the high probability zone
  • As a frame is being pulled, quickly scan the sides of the frames next to the one being removed; sometimes this is a quick find
  • It is best to start from the outside of the frame working to the center so the queen doesn’t sneak away from the scope of vision
  • The pros look for the shape of the queen rather than the mark
  • The distinctive pattern of a queen with workers surrounding her in a circle is an instant give-away, and is usually as easy to find as the queen herself
  • For large colonies with multiple stories, it is a time-saver to insert a queen excluder between the boxes four days before searching.  Four days later the queen will be isolated in the box that contains newly laid eggs

Handling Queen Cells

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Queen cells are very fragile, and an errant poke of a beekeeper’s finger into a queen cell can kill it, causing sadness for the queen breeder, and undoing hundreds of hours of hard work by the nurse bees.

Virgin queen bees typically hatch out of their queen cells on the twelfth day after grafting.  Many queen breeders, however, pull their queen cells from the cell building colonies on the ninth or tenth day, and store the queen cells inside an incubator for the remaining two or three days.   This early harvest frees up space in the cell building colony and reduces the chance of an early virgin queen bee hatching, running amok and destroying the rest of the cells.

When a mature queen cell is ready to be placed inside a queenless colony or inside a mating nuc, it needs to be transported from the queen-rearing apiary to the mating yard.  This is where the queen cell protector does its work.  The mature queen cells are placed into cell protectors and stacked into trays for transporting.  The protectors keep the queen cells from being accidentally damaged by the beekeeper during handling.  They also protect the queen cells from falling over or colliding into each other should the transporting vehicle hit a bump or should the driver need to stop suddenly.

Once the cells have arrived at the mating yard and begin their first step on becoming mated queen bees, the cell protectors can either be placed in the colony with the queen cell inside it; or the queen cell can be placed into the colony without the protector, and the protector saved for the next batch of queen cells.  Some beekeepers think that keeping the queen cells inside cell protectors within the bee hive aids in protecting the queen cell from being destroyed by the worker bees; but this is not really true.  If the bees want to remove a queen cell from a colony they are going to do it with or without the queen cell protector.

A Honeybee Swamp Cooler

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Some people think that humans invented the swamp cooler.  Actually, honeybees did!

The principal of a swamp cooler is to create cool air by fanning a wet surface area, and then to distribute the cool air throughout a house or building via the same fan.

Honey bees follow this exact principal in cooling their beehives.  When honeybees collect water for cooling, they carry it to their beehives in their bodies.  They then regurgitate the water.   They usually smear the water on the underside of the beehive lid. Then worker bees fan furiously, creating cool, humid air that circulates throughout the beehive.  Apparently, honeybees figured out, just as humans did, that cool air drops, because cooling activities almost always take place at the top of the hive.  When you open a lid on a hot day, you will typically find smeared water on the undersurface of the lid, indicating that the bees have been working hard on their “swamp cooler.”

Some people who live in humid climates may not be that familiar with swamp coolers.  That is because these types of cooling systems create considerable humidity as a byproduct of their cooling methods, making them undesirable during times of high humidity.  Fortunately, honey bees, being insects, have no problem with extra humidity.  Bees are bugs after all, and love “bug weather.”

Queen Cages

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Queen bees are transported in various types of cages.  The JZ-BZ plastic queen cage, pictured above, is an excellent cage for shipping and introducing queens.  It is strong, but has plenty of openings to let air in during shipping, and then later to let the pheromone of the queen disperse out into the receiving colony during installation.  The bottom of the cage has a shielded area where the queen can hide when she is feeling insecure.  The long tube is stuffed with queen cage candy for a delayed release of the queen.  Wildflower Meadows ships many small and medium sized orders of queen bees in the JZ-BZ plastic cages, each with six attendant bees inside to support the queen bee.

CA Mini Queen Cage

Because of its light weight and narrow profile, the wooden California Mini Cage, pictured above, is the perfect cage for handling shipments of larger quantities of queens.  Typically, with this kind of cage, the attendant bees reside outside the cage.  Four or more nurse bees will usually cling to the outside of the screen, feeding the queen bee through the screen.  The California Mini Cage’s narrow profile enables the beekeeper to quickly and easily insert it inside the colony without violating the bee space between frames.

Smoker

The Smoker

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Other than perhaps owning a hive tool, nothing says, “I’m a beekeeper” more than carrying around a billowing bee smoker and leaving a cloud of smoke behind you.  Smokers usually come in two sizes, 4- inches and 7-inches.  A 4-inch smoker is pictured here.

Fuel for the bee smoker comes in many shapes and sizes.  Our favorite smoker fuels at Wildflower Meadows are eucalyptus bark, pine needles, and alfalfa pellets.  Some other popular smoker fuels are:

  • Burlap pieces
  • Cotton rolls (unbleached)
  • Small wood chips
  • Peanut shells
  • Rice husks
  • Small branches

Smoke calms the bees in two ways.  First, upon encountering smoke and anticipating an oncoming fire, the bees retreat to the hive and fill their bodies with honey.  (By filling their bodies with honey, the bees are “grabbing the essentials” before potentially heading out for an emergency evacuation.)  This process of filling up with honey distracts the bees from the oncoming human intrusion.  Second, the odor of the smoke disrupts and masks the alarm pheromones that the guard bees give off.  If the alarm pheromones cannot spread effectively, fewer bees are aware that there is any reason to become defensive.

Providing Water For Bees

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When beekeepers get in trouble with their neighbors, more often than not it is due to water issues.  Honeybees need water, especially during hot and dry weather.  If the bees can’t find water close to their hives, they seek it out at the neighbor’s house, sometimes on the side of a swimming pool or hot tub, and sometimes in a pet’s water bowl.  A birdbath may become filled with bees.  Worse is when a neighbor finds his child’s “kiddie pool” crawling with honeybees.  If a child gets accidentally stung – look out!  When this happens, a beekeeper typically loses his or her ability to keep bees at home – and probably rightly so.

A responsible beekeeper always provides water for the bees.  Bees are constantly foraging for water.  The bees use water for hive cooling, for thinning the nectar that they feed to larva, as well as to keep the humidity inside the hive at sufficient levels during dry weather.  Bees consume tremendous quantities of water on hot days.  A single beehive can consume over a quart of water in a day.  At Wildflower Meadows, we have seen our apiary of queen bee building colonies and drone rearing colonies consume over 70 gallons of water per week, for several consecutive weeks in a row.

The best way to provide water for bees is to create a honeybee water garden.  This does not have to be anything especially fancy, although it certainly can be a work of art if you enjoy being creative.  The basic honeybee water garden begins with either an animal watering trough or a small garden pond.   Once you have filled the pond with water, you need to provide the honeybees with something to land on so that they do not drown.   Some beekeepers use a sheet of artificial lawn turf.   At Wildflower Meadows, however, we prefer the more natural approach.  We use water plants, such as water hyacinth.  Water plants not only provide footing for the bees, but they naturally filter the water and keep the pond water clean.