George Imirie's PINK PAGES
November 2001
Answers to Repeated Questions
There are certain questions that are asked at any meeting of beekeepers that
you attend and they are asked not only by beginners and novices, but sometimes
by someone who has had some colonies for several years. As in most cases, these
questions come from someone who has just not paid enough attention to the
studies of bee biology or bee behavior, and it "shows" in their lack of ability
to "keep" bees or make a prosperous honey crop year after year. Every "true"
beekeeper should be able to answer these oft repeated questions with ease, but
in case you have forgotten, here are some of those questions and the answers to
them.
Question #1 : This summer, suddenly I found my colony with little brood and
queenless, so I hurriedly bought a new queen and introduced her, but my bees
killed her. WHY?
Although you did not see a swarm or think there are less bees now than when
the colony was queen-right, the absence of brood and no queen to be found is a
strong indication that the colony swarmed. A swarm is planned ahead by the bees.
It just does not happen on the spur of the moment. Bees stop feeding their
queen, reducing her weight so she can fly, a week or so before the swarm, and
this results in the laying of very little brood. The swarm may take place 3-4
days before a virgin queen emerges from her queen cell. After emergence, the
virgin queen wanders about the colony for several days and even takes a few 5
minute orientation flights around her hive to get the "lay of the land".
She does not become sexually mature until 6-7 days after emergence, and hence
does not take her nuptial flight to the drone gathering area until the first
nice, warm after- noon after she is 6 days old. After breeding with 5-15
different drones (we used to believe it was just one), she returns to the hive
and lays the first few eggs 3 days later. If you now count the number of days
between the day the old queen stopped laying eggs and the day the new queen
started to lay eggs, you come up with a number like 18-25 days. Further, since
some beekeepers have trouble seeing "open brood" and only see CAPPED brood, add
another 10 days making a total of 28-38 days. Further, a virgin queen is very
difficult to see, since her abdomen is not large and elongated by holding the
eggs she will later lay, so she almost looks like just another worker bee.
You have opened your colony, and finding no evidence of a laying queen,
introduced a new queen, and she was killed. Of course she was killed, because
the bees already had a new queen (maybe still a virgin) in their colony and did
not need some "foreigner". You could have saved $15 dollars spent on a
replacement queen, by TESTING the colony to see if it was queenless by just
adding a frame of worker eggs or 1 day old larvae from another colony to the
brood chamber of the suspect colony, wait 2-3 days and inspect whether the bees
have started to build EMERGENCY queen cells on the face of the new frame. If new
emergency cells are found, your colony was queenless and now they are raising a
new emergency queen to replace the old queen; but if no emergency cells have
been started, the bees are "telling" you that they have a queen and you just
have not seen her yet, so new brood will start to be evident in 2-3 weeks.
Question #2: My bees just won't build comb out of foundation, and even eat
holes in the foundation. WHY?
Building comb is hard work, requiring lots of young bees (12-18 days old),
and the bees have to EAT about 8 pounds of honey to make 1 pound of comb! Bees
don't waste their time and energy to do this hard work unless there is an
immediate NEED for drawn comb! What is immediate need for comb? Cells for the
queen to lay brood, or cells to store nectar which will be made into honey.
Hence, there must be a nectar flow present or maybe an ARTIFICIAL nectar flow
(1:2 or 1:1 sugar syrup, not heavy 2:1) for bees to draw foundation into drawn
comb! Even if you do not want more bees, collection of a swarm is the greatest
comb builder you can find, because those bees HAVE TO BUILD COMB IN A BIG HURRY
so the queen has cells to lay in and storage space for nectar to feed these new
bees. Never look a GIFT HORSE in the mouth! Always place a new swarm on foundation
with lots of thin sugar syrup.
Question #3: Is plain sugar a good winter feed? Some say use honey only, and
others use high fructose corn syrup because it is cheap, and some have used soft
drink sweetner, old Jello sweetner or chewing gum sweetner. WHAT IS THE BEST
FEED MATERIAL?
Plain "old table" sugar, which is over 95% sucrose is considered the best and
safest winter feed of ALL feeds, including honey. Plain sugar is converted to
honey as the bees store it, and plain sugar is bee disease free, and has no
indigestible contaminants that might occur in honey from unknown sources or any
of the manmade sweetners. Plain sugar will never give a bee dysentery, which
often occurs to bees during a long winter confinement and fed on disease free
honey or any of the manmade sweetners. Maybe you have forgotten that all nectars
are primarily made of water and SUCROSE (plain old table sugar), and this is
what the bees bring home to be converted into the two simpler sugars, fructose
and glucose, that make up honey.
Question #4: What is the "secret or trick" to have lots of FORAGER AGE bees
ready at the time of a major nectar flow? For example, I have placed colonies of
my bees on the same lot as George Imirie's bees, but his bees always produce
much more honey than mine. WHY?
There is a 40 day period of time between the time an egg is laid and the
worker bee it produces is of foraging age (over 19 days old)! Hence, if your
major honey flow starts about May 10th, the egg that produces a forager age bee
who can forage on that nectar flow has to be laid before April 1st, and hence
you want your queen to be heavily laying eggs during all of MARCH. However,
March is still pretty chilly, and hence, lots of nurse bees are needed then to
keep the cluster warmed to 95° for the queen to lay eggs. By starting to feed
1:1 sugar syrup as a egg laying stimulant for the queen from a gallon jar
directly over the bee cluster in early February, you get a sizable number of new
bees emerged in early March to expand and warm the bee cluster so the queen can
lay more strongly during all of March that will produce a large number of
forager age bees ready to gather the nectar of a major nectar flow that begins
about May 10th. Of course, to prevent swarming, the brood chamber frames must
constantly be REVERSED during this entire period so that the queen essentially
always has open laying space ABOVE her. Having a "ton" of bees in a colony is
NOT the answer to your question. The "trick" is to have lots of FORAGER AGE bees
at the correct time, and the "secret" of that is to start early feeding of
stimulated feed, 1:1 sugar syrup, right on top of the cluster, and REVERSE brood chambers
constantly as needed to prevent swarming.
Question #5: Sometimes my bees have superseded a perfectly fine, high
production queen. WHY?
Maybe you answered your own question when you said "high production" queen
implying that she laid large quantities of worker bees resulting in a high honey
yield. You also said "perfectly fine". To who? You, or the bees? As cruel as it
may be, knowledge of bee biology and bee behavior will clearly point out to you
that worker bees will destroy their own mother and raise a new queen if they are
dissatisfied with the performance of their mother. Maybe the queen has been
injured (even by a careless beekeeper), or was poorly bred so her egg laying
ability has fallen off, or has some disease, or it is just her "time" to die. We
only know that worker bees anticipate and EXPECT certain high standards of egg
laying from a queen, and if she cannot reach those standards, the bees will
supersede her with a new queen. Just because you have heard stories of some
queen laying 3000 eggs/day, and queens still performing well in their 3rd year
and not being superseded doesn't necessarily mean that these performances
actually happened, or these statements have been observed by scientists who were
using a MARKED queen and daily removing all laid brood for counting. Scientists
have estimated (not proven) that as many as 60% of all queens live no longer
than 16 months. Why 16 months? Emerged (born) in April, year 1990, performed
well during all of 1990 and spring of 1991, but was superseded before September
1991, a period of 16 months. We do know that queens "born" in the EARLY spring
might not be as well prepared for a long productive life as a queen born in the
summer, because her entire prenatal care has been "aimed" at an early laying
date by the queen breeder. Further, who is it that can say without fear of
contradiction that the laying of approximately 200,000 eggs per year, one at a
time, doesn't "take something out of you", so you are not equally prepared to
lay another 200,000 eggs the following year?
Bee scientists have clearly proven that a first year queen is superior in all
respects to a second year queen, and far, far, superior to a third year queen.
Most important of these differences is the first year queen rarely swarms when
compared to older queens, and this is why so many honey producers requeen EVERY
year and sometimes twice in a year. Queen substance, 9-ODA (9-oxo-2-decenoic
acid), all though first identified in 1960 has been heavily researched in more
recent years, and this pheromone which inhibits queen rearing to produce swarms
by the workers exists at its highest point immediately after breeding and
reduces in volume a little each day in the life of a queen. Hence, not only is a
very young queen capable of laying many, many eggs, but she also produces enough
queen pheromone that swarming is greatly reduced when compared to an older
queen.
Question #6: There seems to be so many different methods of requeening. Are
there some parameters that should be avoided and others to be utilized for
almost fool-proof requeening? Is there a "best" system?
Although some have observed two queens in the same hive, usually after
supersedure, this is unusual, because 99% of the time, honey bees will not
tolerate more than one queen in the same brood chamber. Two queens, separated by
a double screen and each occupying a separate brood chamber is a totally
different subject. The makeup of a colony as ordained by nature is ONE queen,
maybe 500-800 drones, and up to 60,000 worker bees. There are some parameters to
be considered relative to requeening. The favorite food of a worker bee is
NECTAR, not honey which is only a stored winter food for survival. Hence, bees
are happy and contented during a nectar flow, but grumpy during a dearth of
nectar. Bee management of the brood is easy for them when the weather is warm,
but becomes difficult as the temperature cools. As a worker bee ages, its tasks,
responsibilities, and capabilities change. A bee less than 19 days old, is a
house bee whose principle jobs are feeding the bee larvae, comb building,
ripening nectar into honey, grooming the queen, cleaning and polishing cells for
the queen to lay eggs in, housecleaning, temperature regulation of the hive, and
guard bee; but to sum up all her duties, this "house or nurse bee" primarily
takes care of the queen and her brood. The jobs of the bee older than 19 days is
foraging for nectar, pollen, propolis, or water; and has little to do with the
queen or caring for the brood. Hence, young nurse bees are desirable to be with
the new queen when requeening, but avoid the forager age bees. Since bees
principle sense is olfactory (sense of smell) rather than sight and the inside
of the bee nest is very dark, the new queen has to be pro- tected upon
introduction so most of the bees can smell her and touch her to aid them to
"warm up to the new queen" rather than killing this new foreigner with the odd
smell. It is most helpful if the weather is warm, sunny, with a nectar flow that
keeps the older foraging bees outside foraging and the house bees inside happily
doing their predestined jobs rather than the weather being cool, rainy, windy,
or a dearth of nectar where "everybody" is miserable and discontent. Unlike
humans, the bee is extremely dependent on the weather. The most important job of
the queen is egg laying, so a laying queen is far easier to introduce to new
bees than a non-laying queen. Based on that which is stated above, the best
requeening procedure is to introduce the new queen into a nucleus of only nurse
bees, which is being continuously fed 1:1 sugar syrup, let her start laying some
eggs for several days, then place the nuc over a double screen on top of the
colony to be requeened and leave it undisturbed for 4-5 days and continue the
1:1 feeding. Then, find the old queen and destroy her, remove the double screen
24 hours later, and the colony is requeened successfully about 99% of the time.
For FALL REQUEENING, which I strongly prefer over spring requeening, see an
old PINK PAGE entitled "Imirie's Almost Foolproof Requeening".
George Imirie
Certified EAS Master Beekeeper
[Top]
