It is bee season in south Georgia. What does that mean? Well it means looking at a lot of boxes like the one above.
Bees reproduce by swarming, by making new colonies. A new individual bee is nothing without a colony. When a colony is doing well enough to fill its home they start to change their roles. The queen lays eggs in specially prepared queen cells. When they are sufficiently advanced, usually about ten days, the workers stop feeding her and she gets smaller and restless. At some point she takes about half the colony and leaves to find a new home while the ones left behind nurture the new queens, one of which will take over the egg laying task.
Beekeepers use this to make new colonies on their own schedule. We watch the spring build-up and then step in to make artificial swarms. So I’m out there opening giant bee boxes completely full of bees. I find the queen and set her aside. Then I make one or two, sometimes three new colonies from the brood (pupating worker bees) and honey, move them a couple of miles away so the workers don’t find their way back to the old location and put a new queen in them, usually in the form of a queen pupa supplied by a queen dealer with a specified hatching date.
Finding the queen in a box like that pictured above ain’t easy, can you see her? It takes an unusual level of concentration and awareness, the smell of fresh nectar all around, the buzz of a disturbed colony, the occasional sting and distractions like keeping track of the stage of the honey flow, pollen levels and keeping an eye out for pathologies.
This makes for hard work, especially because it usually goes on in a heavy honey flow. The frames are full of nectar, your gloves get sticky and full of stings and the usual structure of the hive is disrupted by all the honey coming in; the queen can be in all kinds of places she might not ordinarily be as she looks for new places to lay. One holds frame after frame at the right angle to scan it for the queen, making mental notes of the strength of the hive, the location of pollen and brood, trying not to think about the wonderful spring going on all around, the wrens, warblers and vireos singing and whether there might be snakes hiding under the pallet.
