A Winter Hive Loss

While honey bees do not fly in cold weather, they do venture out of their hive on the occasional warm winter day. Bees make cleansing flights and forage for nectar and pollen from early-blooming flowers. Observing the bees’ flight at the hive entrances, one hive showed less flight activity than adjacent hives. The warm day allowed for an inspection of the evidently weaker hive, revealing a small population of bees with brood present. However, all of the brood was drone brood, no worker brood. Drones are produced from infertile eggs, and workers are produced from fertile eggs. And colonies typically don’t produce drones in the winter. It appeared that some of the workers had developed working reproductive systems and had become drone layers. Workers typically don’t lay eggs, however when a hive has been queenless for a period of time, some workers start laying infertile eggs. It appeared that the colony was dwindling in population without a queen producing workers.

Looking deeper into the hive, I found the likely cause of the colony’s population decline and drone laying. I found a queen cell with the side wall chewed out. It appears that the colony attempted to replace its queen during the winter through supersedure. Honey bees in the Mid-South can only produce viable queens from April through August. The queen cell shown here has not been opened at the tip where a queen would emerge. Instead, it was chewed out through the side. A virgin queen emerged in the hive, found this developing queen, and stung her to death through the side of the cell. Workers later chewed through the cell wall and removed the remains. Beekeepers need to be on the lookout for wintertime colony losses and take measures to protect the combs. I stacked the frames of this hive atop the frames of a strong hive. Those bees will protect the combs, and a colony division in the spring, when queens become available, will restore the hive count.

--Richard

Marking a Queen Bee

Being social insects, honey bees share in the duties of the hive. Each individual does not perform all of the daily tasks of the hive. The workers assume different roles and perform the needed colony tasks. The worker bees’ roles change as they age. As these bees age, their various glands develop; and they change in their ability to produce brood food, secrete beeswax, produce an effective sting, and perform various tasks. For this reason, the workers pass through a series of tasks throughout their life. Among the shared tasks performed by the bees are cleaning of the nest, feeding the brood, feeding and tending to the queen, guarding the hive, secreting beeswax, building honey comb, cooling the hive, moving honey and pollen about the hive, foraging for nectar and pollen, and curing honey.

While the honey bee colony shares in collecting, preparing, and storing food, tending to the hive, and feeding and caring for the brood, the colony also employs a common means of reproduction. A single queen bee produces all of the eggs that will become the population of the colony. The male bees, the drones, serve a single role. The drones mate with queen bees. Since the drones never mate with queens inside the hive, they add genetic diversity to surrounding colonies. The queen bee is more likely to be mating with drones from various distant colonies. Since the population of the colony and its success is dependent upon one bee, the queen, she is of utmost importance to the colony. Many beekeepers mark their queens to be able to match the colony’s traits to an individual queen. Honey bee colonies regularly replace their queens through a process called supersedure. If a queen bee is found in the hive without the appropriate marking, it is likely that the queen has been superseded. In the photo, Shirley, Mike, and I are marking a queen bee with a dot of paint on the bees’ thorax.
--Richard