Queen Bee Posts

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.

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.

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.

Marked Queen Bees

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There are many reasons to mark a queen bee, but the most important reason is so that you know that the queen that you purchased is still running the show.  If the original mark is still there – good news – she hasn’t been replaced.  Many beginning beekeepers also like to order their queen bees marked so that they can find her more easily.  While true, this doesn’t always work, because sometimes a colony later replaces a queen.  Her daughter may be the beehive’s new queen.  But how are you going to find this new queen by looking for a mark that doesn’t exist?  This is why, when looking for a queen, it is always best to look for her distinctive shape rather than any mark.

Nevertheless, the best part about marked queen bees is the knowledge that this marking provides.  With the mark, you are certain the queen that you are looking at is the one that you purchased.  For better or worse, you can now judge her performance without any risk of “mistaken identity.”

You can also use the color of the mark to determine the queen’s age.  Queen breeders follow an International Color Code for determining which colors they use to mark queens in any given year.  There are five rotating colors: white for years ending in 1 or 6, yellow for years ending in 2 or 7; red for years ending in 3 or 8; green for years ending in 4 or 9; and blue for years ending in 5 or 0.  This young queen, with her pretty green mark, was born in 2014.

Queen Cage Candy

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Queen cage candy is the primary food source for both the queen bees and the attendant bees when they are shipped through the USPS mail or UPS.  The candy is also a key element of the queen introduction.  Worker bees chew through the candy – typically over the course of a couple of days – while the colony becomes accustomed to the pheromones of the new queen, assuring her safe acceptance.

The history of shipping queen bees via mail goes all the way back to the 1860’s.   Queen producers knew that they needed to include some kind of food for the queen bees and attendants during shipment.  The natural and obvious choice was honey; and the first series of shipments included little pieces of comb honey in the containers.  You can imagine the messy scenes at the post office as a result of this approach.  Surely enough, in 1872, tired of leaky packages, the postal authorities banned shipment of queens through the mail.  The post office, however, never really enforced this ruling.  And beekeepers – being beekeepers – never really gave up trying new methods of shipping queen bees.

The pioneer of queen cage candy was a man named Good, who in the early 1880’s proposed using a mixture of cold honey and sugar to create a dripless honeybee food.  Shortly thereafter beekeepers fine-tuned the concept, eventually settled on a mixture of sugars for the candy.  To this day, some beekeeping books refer to queen cage candy as “Good” candy in honor of this visionary beekeeper.

Today’s queen cage candy typically calls for a mixture two types of sugar, a liquid inverted sugar called nulomoline, plus a dried sugar, which is either powdered sugar or another type of dried sugar called drivert.  The candy-making process itself is not too difficult. The liquid sugar is warmed, and the dried sugar is added until the consistency is just right.  The goal is to achieve the perfect balance of firmness and suppleness in the candy.  If the candy is too hard the bees cannot chew through it.  If the candy is too soft it can melt or drip onto the queen.  Here is where the queen producer becomes a professional candy maker, carefully crafting the ideal sugary food – not for average people, but instead for insect royalty.

Ideal Queen Bee Mating Conditions

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Queen honeybees mate outside the hive in the open while flying, usually in the afternoon.  The mating takes place over the course of several consecutive days.  Mated queen bees typically mate with approximately 10 to 20 drones over the course of their mating flights.  Once the queen bee has mated she will never leave the colony again (unless the colony swarms and she leaves with the swarm.)

Because queen bee mating takes place outside in the open, the weather conditions are critical.  What makes for the best for ideal mating?

  • Temperatures of at least 69º Fahrenheit (but not exceeding 104º)
  • Not too much wind
  • No rain
  • Drones nearby, usually within a mile, so that the queen bee can find drone congregation areas

Poor weather will delay a queen’s mating, and delay her ability to start laying eggs.  If a virgin queen is confined to her hive for over three weeks due to adverse weather, or if she is unsuccessful in her mating efforts during this time, she eventually will begin to lay eggs anyway.  In this case, however, she will only have unfertilized eggs to lay, and will be a considered “drone layer.”