Never a Dull Moment

I've been keeping a close on the hives the last couple of weeks, looking for drones.  Drones are the only males in the hive, whose main purpose is to mate the queen.  The hives won't swarm until there are drones available for the queen, and since all the drones get kicked out of the hive to die before winter sets in, we need a new crop of drones to hatch in the spring.  I'm trying to anticipate when swarming will start, hence the close eye out for drones.

Imagine my excitement when I saw my first drone of the season on the porch of one of the hives!  OK, it was a dead bee, but still, the first drone is a sign of things to come.  Now imagine my feelings when I rolled the "drone" over, only to find that not only was it not a drone, it was actually a queen.

Yikes!

A colony has to have a queen to lay eggs and ensure the continuation of the hive.  A dead queen on the porch is not a good sign.  We were concerned.  But a dead queen is not, in and of itself, a calamity.  If the old queen dies, the colony can create a new queen out of an egg cell.   Sometimes they raise new queens in anticipation of needing a new one, as when the old queen is failing, or is perceived to be weak.  Colonies reproduce by swarming, and to do this they have to raise new queens. We weren't sure what was happening.

Fortunately, the weather moderated, the winds died down, and we had a window of opportunity to get in and look around the hive. 

We set the top box off to one side and went frame by frame through the bottom box, the brood box.  We started at one side and checked them carefully as we took them out.  We saw some drawn comb, then some nectar filled cells.  The brood that we saw were drone cells, so they're coming along.  Then we saw what seemed to be a queen cell which had already hatched.  Ruth wanted to stop at that point, but I wanted to check one more frame.  Pulled it out, it was covered with bees, and lo and behold, Ruth spotted the queen! 

Now how, I hear you asking, could she see a queen alive and kicking in the hive if there was a dead queen on the porch?  Apparently, the deceased queen was felled by the surviving queen.  Two (or more) queens hatched at the same time.  When that happens, they fight it out.  The winner takes over the hive.  The loser...well, we found her on the porch. 

So there you are.  A peek into the inner workings of one our bee hives.  Pretty cool, isn't it?