The Best Intentions

Forget what I said a few weeks ago about feeling like I’ve become a real beekeeper. I may actually be hopelessly inept at this after all, as it turns out.One of my favorite parts of beekeeping is inspecting the hives. Every couple of weeks, responsible beekeepers pry the lids off of their hives and take a peek inside. Some beekeepers do a thorough inspection, digging into every box and looking at every frame.

The bees are generally pretty good sports about this routine home invasion, but look at this way: Imagine if every couple of weeks some giant hand came from above, pried the roof off your house, picked up all your furniture, moved some stuff around, then closed it all back up again. Oh, and occasionally took about half the food from your fridge. It might make you just a tad cranky.

I don’t like to get up in their business too much, but I do go in every couple of weeks and check the top box and the general feel of each colony. If everybody is happy and I don’t see hive beetles, wax moths or mites, and brood and honey are plentiful, I close them back up and go on my way.

However, we had a seemingly chronic case of PMS at our biggest hive. They’re usually a pretty mellow crowd, so when the agitation didn’t ease up after a couple of days, I figured I better suit up and see what was going on. This hive is three boxes deep. I removed the first two boxes, set them aside and began pulling frames out of the bottom box. Found lots of pollen and honey, but no baby bees in the making. No capped larvae, no eggs, nothing.

Same thing in boxes two and three. I made Patrick and Charlie suit up and take a look too, and neither of them saw any brood either. We also didn’t see the queen, but then, we hardly ever find the queen. It was an overcast day, so we couldn’t get as clear a view into the frames as we could if it had been sunny, but either there’s brood or there’s not, and there wasn’t.

That lack of a queen will put a colony in a very bad mood. The queen emits pheromones that keep everything chugging along smoothly. If she suddenly dies, the bees can make a new queen if they have eggs laid within the past few days, otherwise the hive will die unless the queen is replaced. So the cranky state of the hive made sense if there was no queen.

I very competently took control, what with me being a beekeeper and all. I called Jim Pfister, owner of the Organic Honey Bee in Ridge, who had queen bees for sale, and we went up and got a lovely young thing in a queen cage. Which is not nearly as S&M as it sounds. Following Jim’s advice, we removed one frame from the top box to make room for the queen cage to sit in the hive, then closed it up so the girls could get used to the new queen before we turned her loose. If you just drop a new queen into a hive without giving the bees time to adjust to her, they will usually just kill her, which sucks for everyone, especially the queen.

Next morning I dropped by the hives to say hi, and picked up the frame we had removed the day before. In the bright sun, hundreds of larvae were clearly visible deep inside the frames. In my defense, the frames in this hive are older, so the wax is darker, and the cells were pretty deep, so what with the cloudy day, maybe that’s why none of us saw the larvae the day before. Or maybe we’re just terrible beekeepers.

So now I felt like a moron, with a queen in a cage in a hive that already had a queen. If she had fingers and a tiny pen, she’d probably be writing her last will and testament, because a hive full of bees loyal to the reigning queen were trying to get at her and kill her.

In an attempt to turn a mistake into something that seemed like a great idea, we decided to split the hive and put the new queen in her own digs. The conventional wisdom says you have to move the new hive at least half a mile from the old hive, or the bees will all go back to the original hive. But recently I read that if you partially block the hive entrance with branches, the bees will reorient when they fly out, and that will make the new location home, so we tried that.

We moved the queen, four frames of honey and brood, along with all the house bees on those frames, into the new hive box.

Checked a couple of days later, and all seemed to be going well, so we let the queen out of her cage and closed it back up, anticipating a box full of happy little baby bees in no time. And for a while it seemed fine. We removed the branches, bees were coming and going and all was right with the world.

Then it wasn’t. Two more days in, and there was no activity. I took a peek. Tumbleweed city. Nothing.

Patrick thinks they all headed back to the original hive. I think the queen took her new minions and left for parts unknown. Either way, we’re back to three hives. Still not sure what happened, but at least we’re no worse off than we were before. Except for the wasted queen, hours of aggravation, and the embarrassment of somehow not seeing hundreds of larvae that were right in front of us. Maybe it’s time to take up an easier hobby. Or get our eyes checked.