(QUOTE BY JENNY HAN - AMERICAN AUTHOR)

June arrived and brought with it endless days of sunshine. I didn’t do much with the bees as I had four hives with new queens, so I had to leave them alone so they could settle in, get mated and start laying eggs before disturbing them. The last thing you want to do is be mid hive inspection with the queen out on a mating flight and have her return to an open hive; she, more than likely, wouldn’t go back inside. So the first inspection was towards the end of June to look to see if the queens were in residence and laying and they were… all four of them. Perfect!.

So a quiet June honeybee wise and, of course, the bees were out enjoying the weather too so a lot of wandering around with my camera was to be had. And, so it is with much thanks to the wonderful gardener’s in our village, the bees had ample forage and didn’t appear to suffer from the dreaded ‘June Gap.’ Below are some images I managed to take of the girls in full flow.

And so, on to July and what a dreadful July it’s been. The weather, as you are all aware, has been absolutely shocking! So very little to report from the apiary for July too!

I did manage though to find a gap in the rain and find my lovely new queens and mark them. As you can see from the image on the left, they have been marked with a red dot. Every year we mark our queens with different colours so we know the year they were born and also it helps us to identify her in a crowded hive. The queens can be quite shy!.

There are five different colours used to mark queen bees:

White = years ending in a 1 or 6.

Yellow - Years ending in a 2 or 7.

Red - years ending in a 3 0r 8.

Green - years ending in a 4 or 9.

Blue - years ending in 5 or 0.

With the lack of news from the apiary, and all my talk about the queens etc, I thought I would take the opportunity of explaining a little bit about The Life Cycle Of A Queen Bee.

The queen bee is the mother of all the bees in her hive. She is the only bee in the hive that lays eggs and is responsible for both the worker bees, (females), the drones, (male bees), and ironically her successor.

Genetically the worker bee and queen bee are identical.  Any fertilized egg, (worker bee), has the potential to be a queen, the only thing that differentiates them from one another is the queen’s diet. All larvae are fed royal jelly for the first three days, thereafter they are fed on a mixture of pollen and nectar. However, it’s the job of the nurse bees, between the age of 6 and 12 days to choose as many as 20 newly hatched eggs and feed them exclusively on royal jelly. 

Royal jelly is a substance produced by the nurse bees, from the hypopharangeal glands on the sides of their heads.  It’s a milky white substance made up of 67% water, protein, simple sugars and fatty acids. It also contains a number of vitamins including, B5, B6 and C. 

Queen bees have the shortest development period of any of the other bees in the colony.  Once a queen cup has been developed and an egg is present, nurse bees will begin to draw out the comb to about 25mm in length to give the queen larvae room to grow. Nine days after the egg has been laid, the developing queen cell is capped. The larvae spins a cocoon and pupates and the developed queen emerges after 16 days.

With multiple queen cells in the colony, the first queen to emerge from her cell will, on day one, immediately signal her arrival, by making a loud tooting sound.  The unborn queens make a gurgling sound and the emerged queen seeks out her rivals and kills them using her sting, which unlike the worker bees is not barbed and therefore she can use it multiple times.  If she misses any they will fight until only one remains.

Between the 3rd and 5th day she goes on orientation flights to make sure of the exact position of her hive.  From 1st to 3rd week she goes on multiple  mating flights, leaving the hive in search of a drone congregation area.  Hundreds of drones gather together, in the sky, to mate with the queen, and typically they only congregate on sunny days and near their colonies!  The queen, however will fly for 2 - 3 miles in search of suitable mating partners. Honeybees only mate in the air; never on the ground or in the hive. She will only mate with about 10 to 20 drones who will die straight after.

Three to four days after mating the queen starts to lay.  She lays up to 2,000 eggs a day and produces pheromones that unite and guide her entire colony.  She will not leave the hive again and will remain there for four or five years, or until the colony swarms or she dies.

I will end this blog with a short video of the only other inspection I’ve managed this month. One of my new colonies has not been expanding very well, so I removed the super, which barely had one frame with stores on, and shook the bees down into the brood box. Hopefully now, the bees will stop messing around in the super and concentrate on pulling out the comb for the queen to lay. Whether this works or not, I’ll let you know in next months blog!

Thank you, as always for reading this blog. I always like to leave with something heart warming so, in light of the fact that I have just spent 4 wonderful days celebrating the marriage of my sister and, as beekeepers, we always tell our bees about birth, death and marriages, I found this wonderful poem by Rudyard Kipling. Enjoy!

THE BEE-BOY’S SONG

Bees! Bees! Hark to your bees!
"Hide from your neighbours as much as you please,
But all that has happened, to us you must tell,
Or else we will give you no honey to sell!"

            A maiden in her glory,
  Upon her wedding-day,
            Must tell her Bees the story,
  Or else they'll fly away.
              Fly away - die away -
                Dwindle down and leave you!
              But if you don't deceive your Bees,
                Your Bees will not deceive you.

             Marriage, birth or buryin',
  News across the seas,
             All you're sad or merry in,
  You must tell the Bees.
              Tell 'em coming in an' out,
                Where the Fanners fan,
              'Cause the Bees are just about
                As curious as a man!

             Don't you wait where the trees are,
  When the lightnings play,
            Nor don't you hate where Bees are,
  Or else they'll pine away.
              Pine away - dwine away - 
                Anything to leave you!
              But if you never grieve your Bees,
                Your Bees'll never grieve you.