There's too Many Queens in Here; Let's Split

People often describe honey bee colonies as 'super organisms.' While they reproduce on an individual scale--a queen lays individual eggs that hatch into individual bees--they also reproduce on a large and collective scale, which is called swarming. In a swarm situation, the old queen and about half of the bees in the colony take off looking for a new home and leave behind a newly emerged queen with the other half of the workers.

Several factors contribute to when a colony swarms, including the time of year (usually spring), the amount of food and brood in the hive, the space available to expand, and the health of the queen. Beekeepers often try to preempt a swarm by putting half of the bees into a separate hive box, where they can start a new colony rather than establishing themselves in a tree or a neighbor's wall. This is called splitting the hive.

Before a swarm departs, the bees do a lot of preparation, building special cells where the incumbent queen lays eggs destined to become queens. These are called swarm cells and are located on the bottom edge of the frames. This wikipedia page explains the process beautifully, and you can see two of our swarm cells in our last blog post.

Yesterday, we did our first inspection in a couple of weeks and were shocked to find seven swarm cells! We felt a little like I imagine expectant parents feel on first learning about a pregnancy. I thought 'cool but scary!' We both kind of freaked.

Well, if you follow the expectant parent/ super organism analogy, you might say that the colony's water broke this morning! One of the new queens emerged from her cell! (More about that in a moment.) As soon as we saw the swarm cells yesterday, we knew we needed to act fast. So this morning, we took a two-pronged approach to swarm prevention: 1) we split the hive, and 2) we set up the top bar hive with a lure (bee pheromone) inside in hopes of preventing a swarm by attracting the bees to make their new home in our top bar.

We did a 'half and half' or 'even' split, removing the top box from our two-box Langstroth and placing it on a bottom board of its own. Then we took a look inside of each box to check the lay of the land. Our hope was that the old queen, or at least some eggs, would end up in the 'old'  hive (bottom box) and that all of the swarm cells and no old queen would end up in the 'new' hive (top box). The idea being that the old queen could continue her reign of the old hive or, if she had died, new eggs could be made into an emergency queen. And the virgin queens in the swarm cells in the new hive could fight it out amongst themselves to be the reigning monarch of the new colony.

But boy did we get a surprise! It all went as hoped except that the old hive actually had an emerged virgin queen (see photo below), who was running around calling for any other emergent queens to come out and fight to the death like...well, like a queen bee, I suppose. She was 'tooting,' which sounds like a kazoo being sounded at short intervals. You can hear it in the video below.

The new queen:

The new queen calling to the other queens. She's in the upper-left hand corner, moving fast!


I thought I'd heard the same sound yesterday and suspected it might be one of the queens, but it was really incredible to actually locate her by following the sound and to see her running around on the frame. She isn't mated yet so she doesn't have much queen pheromone or the distinctive distended abdomen, so the other bees don't pay her much attention, let alone homage. She actually looks a lot like one of the other bees right now, but her body is a little longer and she doesn't have as distinctive stripes as the workers and drones. Instead, she's kind of a honey color, which gradually becomes dark brown toward the end of her abdomen.

We don't know what's going to happen next because we never found the old queen. I suspect that she has died. If she has, then her daughter queens will continue her lineage in two new colonies. If she is still around in either hive, there might yet be a swarm!

Another interesting thing to think about is what temperament the new colonies will exhibit. Each bee in a colony is the daughter or son of its queen, so she largely determines the characteristics of her offspring. However, there is a wild card thrown in--the drone. Each mated queen mates with several drones (10 to 45--13 on average), and his genes will be expressed in the colony as well. Helen (our first queen) gave us gentle, relatively hardy bees. We'll have to wait to see what the next generation of royalty brings.