Green Queens

Wednesday 24th June

A fabulously hot day today – I closed the shop a bit early today so I could nip back home and see how the bees are because we didn’t have time at the weekend.

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First Hive:

Loads of gummy propolis all over the place today and now this second super is about a third full of honey – at this rate I expect there may be several pounds of surplus honey to harvest this year, but I can’t guess how much until the end of July. I’ll estimate what they have in total at the end of the honey flow and then calculate just what each colony will require to overwinter successfully. Anything surplus to their requirements would not be used by them until the following year, by which time the new honey flow will be on and the ‘old’ honey would be wasted.

Propolis all over the brood chamber frames too and the bees seemed a bit bad tempered with us as well, for no good reason as far as we could tell.

We spotted the queen here fairly quickly (she’s in the bottom left corner) and, fairly predictably I suppose, has barely a trace of green paint left on her, only ten days after being marked!

We didn’t bother trying to mark her again this time - we need expert advice on this, I think! Everything else looked good in the hive so we closed up and moved on to the next one.

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Second Hive:

Once we’d opened up this hive we noticed that the bees were much calmer. The guard bees from the first hive soon gave up bothering us and these ones seemed far more placid.

Lots of propolis gumming everything up here as well and we saw some bees with lumps of it on their legs having recently harvested it.

We found the queen quite easily again (in the centre, near the bottom) and of course...

...she had just a few traces of green left. ‘Bee paint’, they call it? I think it might just be poster paint in a fancy pot!

Marking the Queens

Sunday 14th June

It’s been a fortnight since we last did an inspection. It’s not so urgent to do weekly inspections now that the prime swarming season is over but we need to check that both the queens are laying well because it’s very late in the year to start rearing a new queen now if they are not.

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First Hive:

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The top super is still completely full and they have made good progress building up the foundation in the lower super.

They have started building wax on all but the two end frames...

And there is even some sealed honey in the centre frames. We decided to move the frames around a bit to persuade them to fill all the frames. The end frames are now near the centre and the more full ones have been moved to the ends.

Everything looks in order in the brood box too. The three frames at each end are still not being used but it’s not usually recommended to change the order of these frames, unlike the super frames, so we’ve left them as they are.

All the tiny eggs we saw on this frame a fortnight ago have been sealed over and it’s clear that this is worker brood, not drones. This queen is laying eggs successfully so we decided to try marking her.

We had real trouble marking our previous queen last year. On the few occasions we tried, the paint was always licked off by the next time we looked at her. This year (the international colour code for 2009 queens is green) we bought a vial of ‘proper’ green bee paint from a beekeeping supplier. It looks like a pot of nail varnish but smells more like poster paint (which is what we used unsuccessfully last year). We carefully manoeuvred her over to the corner...

...and very gently (remembering my disaster two weeks ago!) put a tiny dab of paint on her back.

We let the paint dry for about two minutes to be absolutely sure, then let her toddle off amongst all the others – if this paint stays it should be incredibly easy to spot her next time.

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Second Hive:

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This is the colony I’ve been more worried about – drenching the queen in green goop must have been an ordeal for her!

All looks fine in the super (this hive only has one super so far and it’s nearly full of honey).

There are only two unstarted frames at each end of this box but there is still room for expansion without needing to add another super yet.

The pattern of egg-laying here seems perfect and I was relieved to see young larvae at the bottom here – it means the queen wasn’t done in by my paint blob last time!

A couple of frames further on we found bees had recently hatched out of these cells – the first offspring of the new queen – and she had already laid a new egg in each empty cell.

We spotted the queen soon after – still with some traces of green around but mostly cleaned off, thankfully. We tried marking her again, more carefully this time.

However, just like last time, she squirmed around so much, even while held down, that even the tiny mark I put on her ended up spread all over her head and wings again! We didn’t want to let it dry like that so released her quickly and closed up the hive again – this queen will probably be all cleaned up for next time but hopefully the mark on the first queen will stick...

Bad Weather

Sunday 7th May

No chance to do an inspection today, just too rainy. I've a feeling that I didn't kill the second queen last week after all because the colonies are still very good-tempered, unlike when they were queenless. I'll be keeping my fingers crossed for another week now...

Both Queens are Laying

Sunday 31st May


It's been hard to leave the colonies untouched for so long but the queens had to be left undisturbed for at least three weeks. We've had some perfect weather for them to perform their mating flights recently so hopefully they should be busy laying eggs by now...

First Hive

Good sign here on the first frame - loads of pollen (you can see how the colours are so different in each cell here). Bees collect pollen mostly for feeding the larvae so lots of pollen means they're expecting lots of brood, I hope.

And sure enough, on this next frame, a perfect comb filled with freshly laid eggs. A closer view here..

Each cell has one tiny egg standing up in it. They're not easy to see - the shape of a grain of rice but much smaller. They stand up straight for the first day they are laid so the queen has been here recently, though we didn't notice her. There's no way of knowing if these eggs are fertile until they develop more - infertile eggs can only produce male bees, the drones - so there's nothing more to look for in this hive.

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Second hive:

We expected a similar situation in this hive but immediately noticed there were far fewer bees bothering us as we opened it up. The whole colony seemed much quieter, though there were just as many bees in it.

Very surprising seeing this on the frame - three sealed cells, which means there must have been an egg laid in it about a week ago!

Sure enough, these sealed cells are surrounded by well-developed larvae, definitely worker brood from fertile eggs too (drone cells stick up from the frame much more). This is just exactly what we have been hoping for and just had a quick scan through the rest of the frames in case anything looked unusual.

The next frame had the queen on it - this is the one which made that 'piping' sound last time - and she's an incredibly quick mover. We decided to mark her but catching her took ages. I eventually got the queen cage on her to pin her down but she squirmed about so much that the paint blob smudged all over her.

I hope I haven't damaged her now - she had paint all over her eyes and wings too. This is something it says you must NEVER do in the books. It'll be awful if I've only managed to save this queen's life just for a few weeks just so I could extinct her by paint blob. I won't know what damage I've done for another week at least now!...

Looking For Queens

Sunday 10th May

It’s been exactly two weeks since we looked in the hive and found most of our bees missing. We now have these two small queenless colonies which we made up from splitting all that was remaining after the swarm, with the hope that they’d each raise their own queen.

First Hive

Encouraging signs in the supers of this hive – the first super is almost full of honey and the second (which was completely empty last time) has some honey stored in it, though there is plenty more wax building to be done here.

We had marked the brood frame which had the queen cell on last time and you can see it clearly here, hanging at the bottom, but it doesn’t look like I expected it to.

Instead of a nibbled-out rough edge at the bottom where the queen should have chewed her way out, it looks all smooth, like it was never actually sealed shut in the first place.

Suddenly I spotted this other queen cell in the top corner of this same frame. I’m sure it wasn’t there last time but now here it is with a loose flap nibbled out of the bottom where a young queen has climbed out. The bees must have made a new queen cell here after we closed up a fortnight ago, which means this one probably hatched out today!
At this point my wife noticed an odd noise coming from the frame of bees as she held it, a bit like a tiny chick cheeping...

...and here she is – a brand new virgin queen. The sound she was making is called “piping”. Apparently all queens make this sound all the time, much louder when they are distressed. She was probably upset because queen bees are notorious for avoiding the sunlight, always nipping round to the dark side of the frame as you hold it, and this one was now experiencing her first ever glimpse of daylight, poor thing! Not wanting to distress her any further we gently closed this hive up again and turned our attention to the next one.

Second Hive

It seems to be a similar situation in this super – they’ve used some of the honey but not much. This one was completely full last week, and it’s still incredibly heavy to lift.

Surprisingly, it looked like exactly the same situation on this frame – the queen cell we left here is visible hanging on the bottom of the frame...

...but the hole isn’t nibbled away at the bottom like it should be, just rounded off as if it were never sealed at all. For whatever reason, it seems that the two larvae I selected for stardom were actually not fit for purpose. Now our only hope here is that the bees have managed to raise a separate queen without any of my help (fat lot of good that I was, anyway!)

Sure enough, here on the next frame we pulled out are three large queen cells. Depending on how good your eyesight is you may be able to see two remarkable things on this photo...

...first that the bottom of the queen cell on the left is all jagged, like it’s just been nibbled away...

... and then about 3 inches to the left is the new queen, fresh from hatching!

With our minds put at rest as much as is possible, now we have to leave both colonies unopened for three whole weeks so the queens have time to grow and mature, then venture out to find some mates! It's possible that three weeks from today (Sunday 31st May) we'll be able to see eggs in some of these cells.

Family Planning

Saturday 2nd May

The unsealed queen cells I left in the hives will be closed up by the workers on the egg’s ninth day of development. Inside this sealed cell the larva pupates like a caterpillar in a cocoon and the adult queen hatches out on the sixteenth day. This is a much shorter development time than any other bee in the colony - even though the queen is by far the largest - because of her luxury diet as a larva. She has nothing but pure royal jelly for the whole eight days, whereas workers and drones only get this for three days and are then given honey and pollen until their cells are sealed.

Judging by the size of the larvae I left in the hives on Sunday, I think they were probably about 6 days ‘old’. If this is the case, the cells will have been sealed shut on Wednesday this week and I can expect our new queens to hatch out one week later. We’ll have to allow an extra few days in case I estimated the eggs’ ages incorrectly but if we can check them on Sunday 10th May we will be hoping to find two newly-hatched queen bees...

Fame at Last?

Friday 1st May

Oh dear. Surely this is just a coincidence? Norwich is too far away... I think!

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