Bees are fascinating. They exist in a matriarchal society where the main goal is to protect the queen, feed the brood, and collect food stores to survive, then wash-rinse-repeat. All of the bees in the hive are children of the queen bee. The workers are her daughters who do everything from gather nectar and pollen, fan the hive to keep cool, secure openings to keep the hive safe, act as nursemaids for baby bee larvae, the list goes on and on. The males (drones) are her lazy sons who won’t move out or get a job. (Sorry fellas, it’s true…the worker bees will even kill the males during the winter and chuck them out the front of the hive to keep from having to feed the freeloaders over the winter.)
If your queen is not strong, the hive will perish. If a queen dies, the hive will quickly create a few queen cells and wait until the strongest emerges to kill her potential rivals. (Serious Game of Thrones action happening in my backyard, folks.) The new queen will then venture out, mate with a drone from another hive or the wild, and return to spend the rest of her life laying eggs and being waited on by her daughters. The problem with this, is that the queen’s temperament is what determines the hive’s temperament. If you allow the hive to re-queen itself, there is a chance that she will mate with a wild (see: potentially more aggressive or even Africanized) drone and then your entire hive’s personality will mimic this once her brood starts maturing. Allowing bees to work this out naturally is completely acceptable, but there is a risk that you will have problems with a “hot” hive later on when you want to inspect it.
Most professional beekeepers (and many hobby beekeepers) will choose to “re-queen” their hives each year to ensure a consistently strong queen who produces a lot of brood and to prevent the chance of her dying and having the re-queening process start. You can also choose to re-queen when you notice a hive does not have a lot of brood or if the personality of the hive has changed to be more aggressive.
When Matt inspected our original hive (the one we got in 2016) he noticed that the amount of brood seemed reduced. We had already dealt with the results of what was likely a natural re-queening process that caused chaos and did not want to risk this happening with another hive; so, he made the decision to re-queen. Working with a trusted neighbor who is an experienced beekeeper, Matt purchased a replacement queen from a local apiary to pick up later in the week.
To prep for the new queen’s “coronation day” he would first have to locate the current queen and execute her. (It’s like Sparta in the bee’s world, the weak do not survive…) This is not an easy feat. There are typically over 50,000 bees in a hive and the queen in our original hive was not marked in any way when we purchased her. You can tell a queen bee from other’s because she has a much larger abdomen, but she is still a little striped insect amongst many other little striped insects. Matt and our neighbor diligently split up the frames to inspect closely and locate the queen. (Usually a group of “ladies-in-waiting” are surrounding the queen at all times so you can look for her that way.) Once they found her, Matt injected rubbing alcohol into her to kill her (he felt smashing her in front of the hive was too brutal).
Matt picked up the new queen and a couple of attendant bees at the bee ranch and drove her home. She came packaged with a “candy cork” to feed her and was in a little cage. After leaving the hive queen-less for approximately 24 hours, he inserted the candy cork into her cage and sealed the exit with a piece of masking tape. Then, he inserted her cage into the hive. The thought process behind this is that by the time the workers chew through the tape to reach the queen, they will have realized she is their new leader and will have accepted her. There is always a possibility they won’t, and will kill her, only to have this start over again.
When Matt went back to inspect the hive a week later all seemed well; thankfully, the amount of brood is high again and the entire hive was extremely docile, which is what we hoped for.
This process elicited a lot of questions when Matt posted about it on Facebook – questions on why we would kill the queen, what happens if a hive is in the wild and the queen is weak, why we didn’t just free her and replace her after, etc. It seems harsh to just kill her, but the queen cannot survive without the hive and will not leave voluntarily. If she leaves the hive leaves with her in a swarm. The options would be to let her live on with a declining brood – which will eventually lead to the possible collapse of the hive, invasion by robber bees or pests, or for them to swarm; to let the hive kill her as she declines so they can replace her; or, to let her die naturally and allow the hive to re-queen with what could turn out to be a more aggressive queen, in which case we would have to re-queen anyway. Granted, a natural re-queening could turn out fine, but it is a risk when we have so much invested in these ladies.
We have made the decision to re-queen when necessary, probably once every couple of years, unless there is a noted decline in brood, rather than every year as many professional producers do, for the health of our hives and bees.
Do you have questions about the re-queening process? Do you have experience with your own hives – do you allow them to re-queen naturally or do you intervene?