Bees Gone Wild.

DEATH IN THE HIVE!

I went out the other day to do a weekly feed and inspection of the hives, and in the course of opening Roxi's hive I found lots of honey, but no brood (babies).  Usually when looking in the brood boxes (the lower two supers), I can see bee larvae in various stages of development.  The eggs look like tiny grains of rice.  As they get larger they resemble wet, gushy, white grubs, and as they get even older, the brood cells that they're growing in are capped for final development - at which point they chew themselves out of the cell and become adult bees.

Well, there were no developing bees in Roxi's hive AT ALL!  Nada, zero, zilch.  That could only mean one thing - Roxi was no longer there.  And to further corroborate that fact, I noticed that the girls were building queen cells on a couple of the frames.

A colony can not function without a queen.  So if the queen dies, goes missing, or slacks off in her egg production, the hive will begin developing a new queen.  They first begin by building queen cells - which resemble unopened peanut shells like this:

Then they feed the developing larvae royal jelly that transforms a regular worker bee into a queen.  Once she hatches, she will leave the hive (the only time she will ever leave willingly) and take off on a wild bender for 3 or 4 days where she will mate with multiple male bees.  During this flight she will obtain all the sperm she will need to reproduce for the rest of her life.  It's sort of like "Spring Break: Girls Gone Wild," but with bees.

It's not a good idea to let the hive develop their own queen, because you don't have any control over the bees that she will mate with.  We have Africanized honey bees here in Central Texas, and if the queen mates with one of these smarmy dudes, the brood she produces will carry those genetics - and it's likely that the hive will become more aggressive.  Not what I want.

Better to order a new queen from a reputable bee breeder.  The problem is that not many breeders have queens available this late in the summer - they tend to produce their stock for spring when everyone starts new hive installations.

I must go log onto my Austin Urban Beekeepers site to put out an APB for new queen sources.  They are an extraordinarily knowledgeable and helpful group of beeks.   I'm so lucky to be part of it.