The Queen is Dead! Long Live the Queen!

At the end of my last blog, I reported that my queen Roxi was no longer in her hive - a queenless hive - yikes.  So I hurried home to tap into my beek (what beekeepers call themselves) secret weapon - the Austin Urban Beekeeper Group - to find out where I could order a new one.

As expected, I received a very prompt response - no more than 3 minutes after I posted my question.  Jim Hogg - who goes by the moniker "Daddy's Bees" - is the biggest bee evangelist you will ever meet.  He is also the nicest guy you will ever meet.  His calling in life - and he will tell this to you every time you speak with him - is to save the bees - and he's one of Austin's most active bee salvagers.  He must do 3 or 4 "cutouts" a week.  Cutouts are what occur when you discover that a colony of bees has been living and growing in your roof, in your shed, in your composter, ... and you want them removed.  People that do cutouts, not only remove the bees and relocate them to a better spot, they usually cutout a lot of the infrastructure housing the bees - hence the term "cutout".  This has to be done because you have to remove all the comb as well as plug their method of entry in order to keep the bees (or other bees) from returning to the same site.  Jim also collects swarms and finds new homes for them.

Luckily Jim is plugged into just about every bee-related website in the universe, so he was able to tell me exactly who to contact (Koehnen's out of California) and what type of bee to order.

$48 and two days later a new Cordovan Italian queen bee arrived with 7 attendants.  Jim assured me that these Italian queens are the mellowest bees around.  If Jim says it's so, I'm sure it is so.

As luck would have it, when I was doing the queen installation my husband, Tom, and a couple of his friends drove by my hives in their golf cart.  My hives are located between the 15th & 16th holes on the Barton Creek Canyon's golf course over looking a beautiful pond - you can see the two white hives above the far side of the pond that look like two little towers:

Here's a closer look:

Stuart Sargent (one of said golfers) pulled out his iPhone and managed to take a picture of my new queen right before I installed her - what luck - here it is!  It's a bit blurry (wonder why?  he wasn't wearing a bee suit), but you can see the little wooden box that she arrives in with mesh on the side.  It should take 3 or 4 days for the bees to eat away at the candy plug in the end to free her - that should give all the bees enough time to get used to the new queen and accept her.  I'll be doing another inspection in a few days to make sure she's alive and laying.  Hope so!