Queen-sign

Last week I had the most awful experience in the hive.  I picked a warm-ish afternoon, and kitted up, Smoker on, and opened the top of the hive.  I found, as always, lots of bees in the top bit of the brood-and-a-half box.  But when I began to lift each frame out and inspect, I was horrified at the emptiness of the frames.

Each frame had been completely stripped of honey stores; there were bees hanging about aimlessly and they were grumpy.  Within minutes I'd been stung three times on my gloves and once in the groin (why, for God's sake, girls, why the groin every time!?).  There was a miniscule amount of honey left in the corners of some of the frames.  But the most disturbing of all was the emptiness of the cells in the middle. No sealed brood, no open brood, and no pollen stores at all.  Signs of a missing Queen.

I went down into the main brood box and there was even less.  And worse, the two outer frames were full of hard ivy or oil seed rape honey and utterly covered in green mould.  It was heart-wrenching.  I read subsequently that other beekeepers experience mouldy outer frames but it was still shocking to see, and I removed them and filled the empty spaces with a frame feeder and a dummy board.

I could see a huge pile of dead bees on the open mesh floor (OMF).  So I broke the entire hive down and used my hive tool to scrape all the dead off the floor.  Of course when I rebuilt the hive again and put the roof on, my heart quailed because I suddenly realised there might still have been a Queen - even though there was no Queen-sign.  And in messing around on the floor and shifting all the bits and pieces of the hive around I could easily have thrown her out by mistake, or killed her, or damaged her.

All that night I lay there, wondering and worrying.  The next day I went out and I was astonished to see a small but steady stream of bees flying, and bringing in pollen - the best sign of all that a Queen is busy laying eggs.

I had sprayed some Hive Clean in the hive and placed a sticky-backed varroa board in the slot below the OMF.  I sat and watched for a long while and thought, "the only way to know for sure is to get a frame of BIAS (brood in all stages) from someone else.  If they're queenless, they'll make a Queen Cell.  If they're Queenright they'll just be getting along with it."

I went along to the Enfield Hut the next day, and got some good advice, "just wait, Margo, just wait.  Everything is late this year, and the Queens might not have started laying yet."  I realised it was a hard ask, at this incredibly lean and vulnerable time of the year, to ask anyone for a valuable frame full of brood.  There would be hardly any out there.  And to ask from as far away as Enfield, with all the worry about disease transferral and chilled brood; it was an impossible ask.  It made me realise, especially now with a new job so far West of London, that my days with my current association are truly numbered.  To be sensible, I need a beekeeping community nearby.  I need to be sensible now, for a change.

So I went home, and I crossed my fingers; I placed an order for a Queen in May.  And - like all the other beekeepers out there in this part of the world, I held my breath, I watched the weather and I prayed.

I think Paula's on to something when she talks about "communing with the Goddesses" because, while nothing's gone right with the re-housing efforts for us, something went right for the bees this week.

The weather warmed up today, and they were flying, and foraging, and bringing in pollen.  And when I opened the roof to replace the sweet winter fondant food with a tub of warm 2:1 sugar water, I opened the roof and checked one frame and instantly saw 3-days eggs.

Do you know, this time my heart didn't leap and I didn't whoop for joy.  I found myself checking and re-checking what I saw, because I really couldn't quite believe my eyes.  3-day eggs?  Yes really, a tiny rice grain - the Queen was definitely alive and laying AFTER my vigorous clean up last week.  One egg per cell, then? Not a desperate worker female?  No.  Definitely one egg per cell.  There they were, so clear in the light, I couldn't even question my own poor vision.  A laying Queen.  I have a laying Queen!

I didn't go down to check any further, I just quietly put everything back together and closed up the hive.  Then I sat there and put my veiled head in my hands and breathed a very quiet, grateful prayer.

Thank you, God, oh thank you.

Of course I sit and ponder now whether She might only be a drone-layer.  The honeycomb in a Super is larger - so Queens tend to lay drones up there.  Perhaps I should've checked all the way through.  But d'you know what?  I'd rather leave them be for now.  They desperately need a break; a break in the weather, a break from thumping, interfering beekeepers, a break to just get on with the work.  If She's a drone layer, there are still ways to fix things.  But at least I know this generation is not doomed, and they've brought the colony safely through the winter for now.

And d'you know what else?  They were lovely today.  They stayed down.  They didn't sting.  They buzzed quietly on their way; they didn't fly up to my face defensively.  They were just so well-behaved.

My bees are back.