Well Kyle's first supervised inspection took place on friday. He inspected the brewery bees headed up by the Hop Queen. This was a swarm that arrived on the day we visited the Great Yorshire Brewery.
It was clear during Kyle's inspection that there was much more drone brood than any recently arrived swarm has any right to have. As such I went in and checked myself without my "helper" :)
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| Solid drone brood and a beautiful pollen pattern |
As you can see there is 100% drone brood. The drone brood is also housed within worker cells so it isn't something the colony has chosen, it is something forced upon them by their situation. There are a few reason how I know this a drone laying queen rather than a laying worker:
1 - There is a roughly normal brood pattern. Laid as closely together as the drone sized brood allows. With a laying worker it would be a lot more scattered about the place.
2 - The eggs are one to a cell and laid in the bottom. Laying workers will lay mulitple eggs and lack the full length abdomen required to reach the bottom of the cell so the eggs are on the sides.
3 - Oh!.... and we saw a queen in there on friday. If I am honest this is the main way I know, but it is worth considering the other points too :) But then you'd know that if you'd read my last blog :p
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| Some cross comb. Lots of drone brood and a hopeful queen cup. |
It is a real shame that this queen will come to nothing as the way in which the bees have laid down their pollen stores, in a circle around the brood rather than just arching the top, is a trait of the british black bee suggesting these bees might have had some genetic link. The cross-comb shown in the picture above is minimal and only covers two bars so I can easily remove it and attach it to a seperate bar and let them join up the gap. What you may notice on that cross-comb is a hopeful little queen cup.
So the bees clearly recognise the problem. In fact the roar from the hive was alot like the one I heard in a hive I had that went queenless a while back. So what are my options:
1 - "let nature take its course". In time these bees will simply die off leaving empty comb which can be donated to another hive.
This seems a little unfair to the bees and waste of a potential workforce (bad manager!).
2 - Donate some brood. Given some eggs and young brood the bees could raise a new queen albeit not 'their' own genetically.
There are a few problems with this idea. Firstly and Majorly they won't have a queen for another month. With it already being August this does not give them enough time to build up for winter. There is also a danger they would swarm again and further weaken themselves. A lesser problem is that I was only intending to keep this colony for genetic diversity within my queens (and therefore mating drones). This would give me another queen with the same/similar genetics before I have decided which queens I want to propergate from. It would also slightly weaken the donor hive at a time when they need all the bees they can get.
3 - Buy a queen. Queens can be easily purchased on the internet to arrive the following morning in an inroduction cage. They cost between £30-40, which in bee keeping terms isn't a lot. After a brief introduction period the queen is released and can begin laying right away.
Hmmmm I think the purchasing and import of genetically pure races of bee is shady at best. I truely believe local bee populations should be able to stabilise genetically which will allow them to properly react to selection pressures provided by their environment, diseases, pests, and (hopefully) to a lesser extent the beekeeper.
4 - Combine with a queen right colony. This would involve removing The Hop Queen (drone layer) and transferring the comb into another hive that is queenright. The bees need to be 'introduced' or they will fight. A traditional method is using a newspaper combination. A sheet of newspaper is put between the two colonies with a few slits cut in it. By the time the bees have chewed through the paper the scents in the hive have equalised and everyone lives happily ever after. This works well with conventional vertical hives but is a little tricker with a horizontal hive. It can be done though with either a modified follower board (hole in the middle with some newspaper covering it) or simply by masking taping a sheet of newspaper in place between the bars. Since the fighting is triggered by scent I have heard of people spraying the bees with air fresher *eeek!* and walking away. My current preferred method is to dust the bees with icing sugar (powdered sugar), as well as a few combs worth of bees at the end of the hive you're adding it to. This works well in a horizontal hive as sugar dusting is easy, does a improntu mite treatment, and by the time the bees have finished licking the sugar from each other they are all friends (or at the very least work colleagues). You should remember though to buy sugar free of caking agents, or grind your own. This way of combining will also allow you to put the combs within the relevant part of the hive rather than only at one end.
This will ultimately not result in me having another colony but it can potentially strengthen another colony on the approach to winter. However, this comb contains a lot of drone cells which the colony would have to look after and feed.
5 - Make them queenless and then shake them in front of another hive. This would involve removing the queen and leaving them without her for a few days. Theoretically, I can wait till the evening and empty the bees from the comb anyway from the current hive. Without the hive to return to (because I will have moved it) the bees will return to any queenright hive in the area strengthening their workforce. Again theoretically, that volume of flying bees entering a hive in the evening should mean there is no fighting. I could then feed the drone brood to the chickens.... they are in support of this plan.
This has the benefit being able to temperarily bolster any of my hives. The comb could then still be donated to another top bar hive for them to use for stores.
I am currenly torn between options 4 and 5 and would be interested in hearing peoples opinions so please comment.
In other news on checking Boudica hive to see if it would be able to provide a brood donation look who is back!
I had (I thought) removed these critters from Boudica's hive roof but as it happens they have managed to find another way in and rebuilt their nest. This is one of the babies all grown up. All six of the babies were present so either they hadn't left home or they were dropping off some washing for mum.
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