The Fastball, or How I Requeened My Hive Last Week

(Texas) Last week the queen I ordered from Bee Weaver Apiaries arrived. The plan was to requeen one of my hives at Paul’s house. Some might find it strange, a queen bee delivered in the US mail. Not only was it delivered by the postman, it was actually waiting for me in the mailbox. The queen resides inside a very small wooden box with a screen. There are a few worker bees inside this box, maybe four or five, and their role is to tend to the queen. A plug of sugar candy blocks the entrance/exit, and this is what the workers feed to the queen.

My first experience requeening was last year. I have written an account of it. Suffice it to say that it was not easy. When your queen arrives, the clock starts ticking. You only have so long that the queen can last in the queen cage. You need to get a move-on and install her. That amount of time might be a week or longer, but I think most prefer to do it immediately.

The task of finding a queen bee can be daunting, especially to the inexperienced such as myself. It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Or as I told Paul last week, “a needle in a needle stack.” Among the thousands of bees in a hive, you are looking for one particular bee. She has a head, eyes, a thorax, an abdomen, and wings just like all the other bees in the hive. She is distinguished by being bigger than worker bees. But so are drones. The queen bee is different primarily by virtue of its larger abdomen. Imagine a bee with a big swollen pregnant belly. That is the queen. Not the bees with the large heads and broad shoulders–those are the drones.

You can help yourself in finding a queen. I had learned that much from experience. So earlier in the spring, when I added a second medium super to the hive, I placed the queen excluder between the supers. This would keep the queen in just one super and one, limit the size of the hive (by restricting the amount of space/comb that the queen has to lay eggs and create brood), and two, isolate the queen to just one super and make her easier to find. I’ve already had the experience of dealing with a super big hotter-than-I-would like hive. Lesson learned.

The first step was to identify which super the queen had made her stomping grounds. While almost certainly she would be in the bottom super, you don’t know until you verify. You do that by looking for eggs/larvae/brood in the super. As expected, the upper super had no evidence of queen activity (and was about 1/3 full of honey). So I was now certain that the queen would be in the bottom super. And so the task begins of looking through each frame for the queen. Another thing that I have come to believe is that you can “drive” a queen into a bottom super by smoking heavily from the top. That didn’t apply to my situation, but it’s something to potentially take advantage of in a situation where the queen could be in two or three different supers.

I began looking through each frame one by one. In these frames, I had started them with shallow wax foundation that did not reach the bottom of the medium frames. Think of a halter top that doesn’t reach the belly button. I had space between the bottoms of the comb, and the bottoms of the frames. That’s not a problem for the bees, but it was a problem for me, because the bees like to congregate in these spaces and it makes it very hard to actually see the bees. A great hiding place for the queen. As I was looking at the frames, I was commenting to Paul about what I was doing. He was wearing a veil and gloves. What I was not relating was the running dialogue in my head–”I hope I find her. Boy, I hope I don’t have to come back tomorrow and try and find her again. I’ll bet she is hiding in the bottoms of the frames. I hope I don’t have to go through all ten frames multiple times. You better start thinking positively, you don’t have the luxury of not getting the job done.” And that last thought is actually a very important point. When there is no one else to do the job, and the job must get done, then you don’t have the luxury of being able to walk away. It has to be done, and you have to find a way. There is no one to call, no one you can hire. It gets done, or you fail. A lot of life is like this, but it’s a lesson that some fail to learn.

Scanning for the thing that is different is kind of a strange thing. How do you approach it? Do you use a strategy? Instinct? Tricks of the trade? How much time do you spend on each frame. I have a few ideas. Searching is partly conscious and partly subconscious. While you may have never looked for a queen bee, everyone has had to look for something. You keep the idea of searching in the forefront of your mind, but you are scanning ways that are both conscious and subconscious. The object may suddenly “appear” as you go about your search. It’s the same with bees. The first thing I do is quickly take in the scene of the frame without consciously scanning or searching. I’m looking for something to pop out as noticeable and different, without conscious effort. I do this quickly because the queen is likely to try and flee to the dark side of the frame (the other side away from the sunlight, or into edges and cracks). After that, I begin consciously scanning the frame. Forcibly telling my mind to find the queen. And then I repeat the process on the other side of the frame. When done, I place the frame in a different box. It’s my “already searched pile.” When bees are agitated, they move quickly across the frame chaotically. It’s to your advantage for the bees to be calm and not moving. My father had suggested in the past to spray sugar water on the frames. I did this last year, but not this time. As it was, the bees were pretty calm (which made me wonder aloud whether I was doing the right thing to kill this queen).

I should probably explain why I would want to kill a queen. In short, the purpose is to replace the genetics of the old queen with the genetics of a newly purchased queen. In this case, I wanted the calmer bees that would be the result of this newly purchased queen. Overtime, this purchased queen will die, or be killed/replaced by the hive unbeknownst to me if I am not actively looking for the queen all the time (and this assumes that I have purchased a marked queen, i.e. painted dot on the thorax). The hive will breed a new queen who will fly into the air, mate with whatever drone is around, and then return to the hive to lay eggs. In that case, your genetics are now local, and may be more aggressive, or have traits that are undesirable. Replacing queens is part of the animal husbandry that a beekeeper does.

It was about the fifth frame when a bee suddenly caught my eye. It was the queen. I showed her to Paul, and he remarked that she looked different than the workers, but not all that different. It’s a huge advantage to very familiar with what a queen looks like, when looking for her. Kind of an obvious sentiment, but true. She poked her head into one of the cells and then came out and moved around a bit on the comb. I didn’t want to wait around, so I began to smash her with my hive tool against the comb. You know how it is killing a bug sometimes, part of it is smashed, but it’s still mostly alive. I got her onto my hive tool and away from the hive. A few workers were on the tool with her. I imagined that they were trying to protect her and tend to her. Perhaps. I picked up her fat abdomen, which is filled with rich white fluid, and smeared it on the screen of the queen cage, with the new queen. Legend has it that helps with acceptance of the new queen.

Why not just place the new queen in the hive without killing the old queen? Because the new queen would be killed instantly. The old queen must be killed, and the new queen must be given time to be accepted. She will remain inside the queen cage within the hive for perhaps up to a week, as the hive becomes accustomed to her scent (pheromones) and accepts her reign. By the time the bees have eaten through the sugar plug she will have become the “official” queen of the hive. If all goes as planned.

So I did it. It was much easier than I expected. No epic travails. I’ve probably spent more time typing this than I took actually looking for the queen. It wasn’t until the hive had been put back together and I was talking to Paul did I really realize that this was a kind of significant moment in my beekeeping history. Replacing the queen of this hive marks the official end of the genetics of my first hive–the package of bees that I purchased from Bee Weaver in 2007 (SMR variety). This was the hive that had sat next to my air conditioning unit in Dallas, that had been moved to Annie’s house in Plano, and had been split apart into a few hives, and this was the final split that had not been requeened last year. These bees had never been treated with any medications–they were survivors. And they no doubt contributed to the feral bee population with their swarms and drones. While the colony continues, the genetics end. At least within the hive. But the replacement queen is no doubt a relative, and perhaps even a descendant, having come from the same apiary. Was it only in 2007? It feels like ten years ago. Is this where I say “time goes slowly”?

Ah, a good feeling to have completed the requeening of the hive, with a tip of the hat to my original bees. I have one more hive that I would like to requeen, which is the converted top-bar-to-Langstroth hive from my father. But that will have to wait until next year, as the conversion is still in process and the hive is actually quite weak. Requeening that hive will mark the end of our possession of the descendants of his bees (i.e the genetics of those bees), which I believe he has has kept in some form or fashion since I was a teenager. All things must eventually end. In the words of the playwright August Wilson, “Death ain’t nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.” Last week I was the pitcher. Someday I will be the batter. As will we all.