You can go with this, or you can go with that

The virgin queen's mating flight has always struck me as a pretty risky proposition. There's this big, young, juicy insect upon whom the continuation of thousands of other insects depends, and she's going to leave the hive, fly far away--maybe more than a mile--find a bunch of mates and then return to the hive unharmed. You can just imagine how pleased a robin or blue jay would be to come across a queen on her mating flight, and I often wonder what percentage of queens actually make it back to the hive. Last year, only one of our seven hives went queenless. This year two of our hives went queenless, and it provided an opportunity to try a new beekeeping technique. With one of the hives, we simply combined it with a strong queen-right colony, and that seems to have worked out just fine. Here's the cool part...with the second hive, Tim gave them eggs from another colony, hoping that they would make a new queen. Sure enough, nine days after giving the hive a frame of brood with eggs, Tim looked in and found that the bees had made seven queen cells! We were so proud of A) correctly diagnosing a queenless hive and B) having such great results from the remedy we chose. But really the props have to go to the bees--aren't they just amazing?!