We just opened the top of my hive to replace some sugar water in the feeder, that's all we did.
"Is that a Queen?" Tom asked. I did a double-take and checked again in the empty red round plastic container. Blow me down, it was a Queen. She looked strange. Well, of course she would. She was a Virgin Queen; she was slow and thin and meek. She was one of the new born Queens and she had managed to squeeze her thin long body into an inaccessible slot on the side of the feeder, into a space where no other bee could go, hiding in fear for her life.
Nature can be a terrible thing.
A colony of bees is not just a group of 50,000 individual insects. It is a collective; a Hive Mind; a terrible, beautiful thing. It makes decisions, it manages the collective, it chooses who lives and who dies. 50,000 bees - most of them female - decide together how many babies should be male and how many female; how much honey to make, consume and store; where the honey should go; what pollen should be collected; where to forage; what time of the year to grow the colony and what time of year to slow down and sleep.
Above all, they manage the Queen. She isn't a leader in any real sense of the word. She is their baby-making machine; she is the repository of future generations. So they worship her, and protect her, and lick her pheromones from her body in order to know her and bond with her. And when the time comes, if need be, they kill her.
From just one Mating Flight early in her life, a good Queen can keep laying eggs for up to 4 years. But then she grows old, and her body produces too many male eggs and she becomes a liability, shortening the life of the collective. So the worker bees begin to make Queen Cells in the honeycomb. The unsuspecting Queen lays eggs in these specials cells, and her daughters work hard to turn these eggs into potential new Queens. They feed her Royal Jelly, a special type of bee-bread. This food accelerates her growth; her special cell is capped and closed for her birth in just 16 days - 5 less than a normal bee gestation.
In that time, the old Queen might realise her time is done. Often she escapes from the hive in a swarm, taking with her half of the mature, flying, foraging bee workforce. The rest she leaves behind, those young enough to work inside the hive and protect the new Queen being born.
As is the way in all things, the collective does what it does best - it hedges its bets. It makes more than one Queen Cell. Then it keeps working, nurturing the babies, foraging for honey, building honeycomb. The work goes on while the Virgin Queens lie in their cells, waiting to be born.
If you happened to be there on the day and you listened very closely, you might hear a magical thing - a terrible, beautiful thing. You would hear the sound of Virgin Queens in their Cells "piping". They make a special noise to let the other Virgins know where they are. This is because they know that a hive can only have one Queen. Each Virgin is born and the first thing she must do is find her competitors and kill them, so that only one Queen remains.
On the day that Tom and I came to check on the hive - not interfering, just feeding, we found a brand new Virgin Queen, just born, who came to hide from her fight to the death. Her fierce competitors were somewhere in the hive, either hiding or hunting.
I look at her, so new, so young. How can I describe what I feel - such a mixture of pleasure and pain. She represents the success of our strategy - splitting the hive to make increase: a hive for me and a new one for Tom. But she is so beautiful and so valuable, and such a magical creature. I don't know her but I love her already, and I fear for her and I want to keep her and protect her. I look at her for just a moment longer, then I carefully lift her up and drop her her back into the hive. I fill up the feeder and close up the roof. And then I turn and walk away.
What else could I do?
By tomorrow she will either be dead, or flying out to mate.
