ARRIVAL OF THE QUEEN OF SHEBA

What a strange title to give to this blog! And yet, when I think of the Sunday 16th June, when the sun shone consistently for the first time in quite some time, and I had a chance to go to the apiary to go through my hives… the appearance of a mated queen related to the artificial swarm I did, (see blog - ‘To Split Or Not To Split”), sent a shiver through my entire being and George Frideric Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba coursed through my veins.

A bit over the top Meriet? No, not at all. You see we beekeepers and our bees have had a very wobbly start to the year, with yet again, our unpredictable weather. So, seeing a queen who has managed to get mated, while dodging the cold and the rain was a wonderful sight. Not to mention I had promised this hive to a new beekeeper and friend, Jane, so it was a double delight. She came with me to see if the artificial swarm had worked and when we spotted the queen I think we both could have cried!

“Ta-da” I said, “You are now the proud Mummy to a queen bee” and we marked her with a green dot!

Let me tell you a bit about how raising a queen works and what she means to a hive.

Right from the start of a queen bee’s life cycle the colony is totally invested in her success and reliant on her being able to fullfill her duties. Being the queen, you would be mistaken to think she will be sitting pretty in the hive with only one job to do, which is lay eggs. Read on dear readers, you will be amazed.

A lot of time is taken up by beekeepers worrying about the queens in our colonies. No matter how many facts we know, or think we know about the queen bee, you cannot underestimate her importance and see her as so much more than an egg-laying machine, as some are want to call her.

Like all insects, the honeybees pass through four stages and they are:

Egg.

Larva.

Pupa.

Adult.

However, each bee in the hive has a different time frame from egg to adult.

Drones - 24 days.

Worker - 21 days.

Queen - 16 days.

All the honeybees in the colony go through different stages of development. But let’s look at why a colony creates a new queen.

The old one has died.

The current one is failing.

A colony is preparing to swarm.

Any fertilised egg has the potential to be a queen. If a queen is failing, it could be because she is running out of semen and will soon be unable to fertilise eggs. In this regard the bees have to act quickly before she becomes a drone laying queen, (laying only unfertilised eggs), which means they won’t have the fertilised eggs required to produce a new queen.

As soon as the bees sense there is something wrong, i.e., they are about to swarm due to the hive being overcrowded or the queen is ‘failing,’ they will build queen cups and a lot of them. Queen cups are wax cells that hang down from the comb and the workers encourage the queen to fertilise the eggs she lays in them. (The queen can choose whether or not to fertilise eggs or not!). The workers only have a couple of days to do this as eggs over 2 days old don’t make good queens. Once an egg has been laid in a queen cup we refer to them as queen cells and a new queens life has begun.

After three days the eggs, be they drone, worker or queen eggs, develop into larva and they all need to eat in order to grow, and the queen larva is bigger than the worker and drone and she eats lots!

Worker bees, in the early stages of their life, are called nurse bees and it’s their job to feed all the larvae in their colony. Between 3 and 12 days old they secrete a substance called royal jelly from glands on the side of their heads called hypopharyndeal glands. Royal jelly is crucial for the growth of all larvae. However, after the first three days, they stop feeding the worker and drone larvae the royal jelly and feed them on a mixture of pollen, nextar and their saliva which we call bee bread. The queens, however, are only fed a diet of royal jelly, which causes the eggs to develop faster and grow much bigger. As the queen larva grows bigger than all the other larvae the honeybees build a peanut shaped cell around the growing larvae which hang down from the comb.

About 7 days after the initial eggs have been laid the nurse bees stops feeding the larvae and the worker bees will close the queen cells with wax. Inside the capped queen cell the larva spins a cocoon and begins to metamorphosize into a queen.

After 16 days, with the help of the worker bees, the queens begin to chew their way out of their cells and once again the nurse bees will start to feed the new queens with royal jelly.

Now some rather dirty work has to be done. The first queen out will herald her arrival by making a trumpeting sound. The other queens, still in their cells, make a gurgling sound which lets the first queen out know where they are. Instinctively she will go around all the other queen cells and kill her sisters! Harsh, but there can only be one queen in the colony. If she misses any they will fight to the death until one queen remains. How does she kill them? She stings them. The queen, like the workers has a sting, but unlike the workers her sting is not barbed and therefore she can use it repeatedly.

Once her battles have been fought and won she will stay in the hive for a few days and then leave to go on a mating flight. She flys for about a mile, in search of a DCA, (Drone Congreation Area), where the drones gather in their hundreds waiting for the arrival of virgin queens. She flys through them and mates in the air with about 12 drones which provides her with enough sperm to last up to 3 - 5 years. This whole performance is fraught with danger. She could be killed by an unexpected rains storm or eaten by a bird on her way there or back. This is the only time she will leave the hive unless she is part of a swarm.

Once mated she returns to her colony and it takes a few days for her abdomen to swell and pheromones to kick in.

The queen can choose the sex of the eggs she lays! She can lay a fertilised egg, (worker), or unfertilised, (drone). The workers build two sizes of cells. Worker cells are smaller than the drone cells so the queen measures the size of the cell she is about to lay an egg in with her front legs. As the egg travels through her body, she has the option to release semen and fertilise the egg or not. Boom!

So apart from laying 2000 eggs a day what else does she do? Well, truly that is her only duty. The rest is happenstance; she has pheromones, (scents), and these, especially the QMP, Queen Mandibular Pheromone, determines the stability of the colony by letting the other bees know that she’s there, alive and well and preventing the worker bees from laying eggs. It guides the flying bees back to their hives. I know right? Wow! And there you have it… there is more, of course, I could tell you but I think that’s enough for today!

She is not the most important bee in the colony. The honeybees absolutely know that each bee plays an important role in the success of the colony but she is the only one and perhaps this is what gives her the status. There are, approximately, 50,000 honeybees in one of my hives, (I haven’t counted them!), 44,999 are workers, 5,000 are drones and the remaining 1 is the queen!

Now, perhaps you can understand my joy, after a very tough spring, I was so delighted to see she had made it and the bees were happy.

Normally I leave you with a quote but today I leave you with the link below: Handel’s Arrival of The Queen of Sheeba and tell me it doesn’t make you tingle when you think of my beautiful queen bees!

https://youtu.be/-TGKJ9MgCOQ?si=4S11c61tDBfRSy1E