Posts Tagged ‘virgin queen’

Update on the Update of the Queens

Sunday, April 19th, 2009

I don’t know if any of you noticed on the beehive webcam that the workers in the observation hive had torn down the queen cell that I had given them on April 15th. There had not been enough time for the queen in the cell to have matured, so I suspected something else was up. After seeing this, I had a feeling that we actually had a queen even though after a thorough earlier searches, I could not find her.

As I mentioned before, virgin queens are found in places that you don’t normally expect to find them and it is not uncommon for a virgin queen to hide on a side wall of the hive and not on frame. So I must have overlooked her in my earlier searches. I checked the observation hive yesterday and found a queen! There was no brood yet and her abdomen had not yet swelled, so she may still be a virgin.

I will check again later in the week to see if there is brood present in the hive. Once there is brood, I will mark her and place her up in the observation area. I have a troop of Girl Scouts coming over later in the week and I would really like for them to be able to see her and some brood. If she is not ready in time, I will probably take her and the rest of her colony and put them into a nuc at my bee yard and place another laying queen and her colony into the observation hive for a while.

Tags:
Posted in hive management | No Comments »

We Have Queens!

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

The temperature warmed up today to almost 70 degrees F. after the overnight frost and snow showers yesterday. Talk about confusing weather for the bees! I was able to get into the observation hive today and the twelve nucs I started on April 1st with grafted and natural queen cells to see if the new queens had emerged. To my amazement, I found the virgin or possibly newly mated queen in the observation hive and all twelve mating nucs. In the observation hive, I found her in the lower chamber, below the queen excluder, which is where she needs to be to take her mating flight/s where she will hopefully mate with 15 to 20 drones in order to ensure that she will be a successful monarch.

I was also amazed to find all 12 queens in the mating nucs that I started on April 1st. I was very pleasantly surprised that all successfully emerged from their cells as not all the queens survive to emerge. Secondly, I was fortunate to be able to spot the young queens as they don’t look much different that the workers and move around the comb and hive rapidly and are found in places that a laying queen normally does not go.

Check out the picture and see if you can spot the queen.

imgp01521

Can’t find her?  Maybe this will help.

imgp0168

Or this?

imgp0169

click on any picture to see all pictures in the post and, again to select a picture you want to view and then once again to see it full screen

You may be able to see a mite in the third picture to the upper right of the queen. The mite is on the abdoment of the worker.

I am going to leave all the queens undisturbed for at least a week to be sure that they have taken their mating flights and will wait until I see eggs or larvae in the hives before trying to move them into full 10 frame hive bodies and attempt to mark them. The mating flights come with significant peril as they run a gauntlet of birds and dragon flies to find the drones to mate with. I will report back in a week or so to let you know how many made it.

Tags: ,
Posted in A Look Inside the Hive, hive management | No Comments »

A New Queen?

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

A few days ago I installed a new frame into the viewing area of the observation hive along with five additional frames of young bees down below. The colony was without a queen. The camera was focused on a natural queen cell that was capped off.

imgp01332

We watched for several days hoping to see her emerge. Today, April 7th, she has apparently emerged as the workers are tearing the cell down. You can watch their progress on the webcam.

imgp0146

I have not been able to find her on the frame in the viewing area, but she may be small enough to fit through the queen excluder and be with the bees down below. The other possibility is that the queen died in her cell, and the workers sensed that, and are now tearing down the cell after removing her remains. It’s too cold today to open up the hive to see if I can find her - plus it would probably be a good idea to let her settle down anyway after just emerging from her cell.  If she is trapped up above the queen excluder, I will need to move her down below it so she can take her mating flight and hopefully return to the colony to begin her reign.

A young virgin queen is usually very difficult to find as they are not much bigger than the typical worker bee and they are usually very “runny” - meaning that they move very fast, and often can be found on the side walls of the hive - unlike a laying queen. It is only after their mating flight has occurred and the queen begins to lay eggs, that her abdomen swells up and she becomes slower moving spending most of her time on the comb laying eggs.

Stay tuned as I will report on my progress in looking for the new queen.

Tags: ,
Posted in A Look Inside the Hive | No Comments »