Though your bee knowledge may be rudimentary, you most certainly know two things about bees. One, they make honey. Two, the Queen Bee rules the roost.
But, what does the queen actually do? And how does one become Queen Bee? Do bees appoint the queen? Does she look different than other bees? How many queens are in a hive? These are among the many questions I field about queens. Often, discussion about bees begins with inquiries about the queen.
For starters, there is just one queen for every hive. She is the heart and soul of the colony and the reason for nearly everything the rest of the community does. Without her, the colony cannot survive. One would think the royal status means for a life of luxury. But the role comes with tremendous responsibility. And the coronation process for a new queen is wrought with drama and scandal that rivals a daytime soap.
Some beekeepers choose to mark their queens like this one in order to make them easier to find during hive inspections. Generally, a different color is used every year. This allows them to determine the queen’s age.
It All Starts with the Queen Cup
The “womb” for development of a baby queen is a specially made honeycomb cell called a queen cup.
Among the very first skills a beekeeper learns is how to spot these queen cells during hive inspections. Their presence — or absence – can tell the beekeeper a lot about the mindset of the colony. They are easy to find as they are very different from cells for commonplace worker bees. Queen cells are much larger and resemble a peanut hanging from the comb.
The colony will make queen cells to re-queen, or “make” a new queen, for one of three reasons:
- Their queen died or they are setting up an emergency queen cell in preparation for the day they may need a new queen.
- They are looking to overthrow their current queen because they don’t like the job she is doing. She may be old or injured or laying eggs in an undesirable, spotty pattern that makes for inefficient care of brood (eggs and larvae).
- They are planning to fly the coop (swarm) with the queen. This most often happens when they are crowded in the hive, with no room to expand their family, or ventilation is poor.
As a beekeeper, options one and two are cool. Option three is not. This means you will lose half your bees, or even all of them, along with the queen if you don’t make changes fast. Truth be told, there is little that can really be done to keep them hanging around when they have made up their minds to swarm or abscond. This is one of the reasons modern beekeepers manage the size of their hives throughout the year.
This is the capped queen cell with the baby Queen Sophia “in the oven” so to speak, waiting to be born.
These are empty swarm cells l I removed from one of my hives. Swarm cells are located on the bottom of the frames in a hive. Queen cups are located in the middle of the frames.
My First New Queen
My first experience with re-queening came my second year of beekeeping, shortly after I purchased a new colony from another beekeeper in my area.
When I inspected the hive about a week later, I found no queen and no eggs. Not good. Though beekeepers do not always see the queen during an inspection, the presence of eggs (which are much easier to find) is a telltale sign the queen is in the house. No eggs means no queen.
So, what happened to my queen? Either I killed her by accident when I inspected the hive that first day. Or the workers ousted her because they blamed her for the disruption of their lives when the hive was moved to my apiary.
Silly bees. They may have instinct, but they have no ability to reason. Or, do they? What I also found during my inspection was a single queen cell in the middle of one of the frames, indicative of re-queening.
Though this was a promising sign, as a new beekeeper I was in a mild panic about the queen-less hive. Good thing I had joined the bee club, so I had a place to turn for advice. Veteran beekeepers asked, “Was the queen cell capped?”
Yes, it was.
“Well then your bees indeed are re-queening. Leave them alone for about three weeks. You need to wait for the new queen to be hatched, get mated and begin laying eggs. Check back with them in about 20 days to see if you find eggs.”
Trusting the Process
That first re-queening experience was sheer torture for me as I waited for nature to take its course. Helpless to do anything, I sat back and let them handle business in peace.
In the interim, I learned about re-queening. I discovered bees can make their own queen out of any common peasant. Just have the queen lay an egg in the big queen cup and feed it royal jelly. Not that prepared? The queen died? Well any egg in any cell will do as long as you feed it copious amounts of royal jelly — the secret ingredient. Royal jelly transforms a bee from an ordinary worker into a queen and extends her life span from six weeks to several years.
Now for the licentious stuff. The first mission of the queen upon hatching is to roam the hive looking for other potential queens. She will fatally sting them in their cell before they hatch or engage in a battle-to-the-death with a rival should they hatch simultaneously. She will even enlist the help of worker bees to get the job done. (Author’s note: there is new evidence that is displacing this long-held belief about the queening process. Read here to learn more).
The queen’s next move is to leave the hive for her nuptial flight. Over the course of several days, the virgin queen is mated mid-air by 10-15 drones (male bees) of all sorts, from this side of the track and the other. This indiscriminate behavior is desirable from a genetic standpoint as it creates DNA diversity (bees with the same mother but different fathers) in the colony. The newly mated queen then returns to the hive, where she lives out her life.
While this is the normal order for a colony to re-queen, things can go awry. The queen could get injured during the mating process, be battered by a storm or get eaten by a predator. She usually makes it back to the hive, but not always.
Queen bees typically live one or two years, though they can live upwards of five. They are most industrious and vigorous in years one and two, laying 1,500 eggs a day on a good day. Because productivity is paramount to beekeepers, the queen will be regularly replaced as a management practice. This act also breaks the cycle of the varroa destructor mite.
Introducing Her Royal Highness, Queen Sophia
So, what happened with my hive? Just as was predicted, I found beautiful little eggs from my new queen, Sophia, when I inspected the hive three weeks later.
The re-queening process has become somewhat old hat for me and luck has been on my side thus far. By the end of that second year, both colonies had re-queened. In the spring of my third year of beekeeping, I split those two hives into four, performing what is called a “walk away split.” I allowed two of them to make a new queen on their own. I kept the original queen on the third hive and purchased a new queen for the fourth.
In addition to disrupting the varroa mite cycle, the upside of re-queening is that the hive will have a new, young, productive Queen Bee. The downside is loss of time for production of bees and honey. For commercial beekeepers, this is a big deal, so most will purchase a mated queen to get the hive back up and running. For backyard beekeepers like me, it is part of the learning curve in my journey to “save the bees” and bottle a few jars of honey.
This very large swarm settled in a willow in my apiary in the spring of 2020. Swarms are attracted to apiaries with other bees. They assume the neighborhood must be prime real estate to build a home.
Mark, a fellow bee club member, captured the entire swarm using a bee vacuum, specially made by Larry, another club member, to gently suck bees into a 5-gallon bucket. It’s pretty slick, as Mark caught the queen and almost every bee from the swarm, with no injuries to man or bees.