Re-Queening

So Queen Stella turns out to be a drone laying queen. This is no good. I mean, all the boys do is lounge about the hive all day eating and faffing and probably playing Nintendo. We don't need any more drones. We need workers. We need girls. The ones who go out and do all the collecting and cleaning and feeding. It's amazing how some roles cross the species divide, isn't it? Anyway, after a couple of weeks of hoping to spot some eggs, and finding nowt but drone cells and drone larvae, we reluctantly decided yesterday that Queen Stella's days are numbered. There is no room for a prude queen in the hive; queens who lay only drones are unmated queens. We need a girl who's been out and strutted her stuff in the rumpy-pumpy airways and has gathered herself some good fertilising qualities.

It's difficult to find a mated queen in late August. We've got about 6 weeks to make sure the colony doesn't lose numbers too drastically and have a snowball's hope of surviving the winter. We need a gal who'll get in there and lay eggs, for heaven's sake and not wander around the place pandering to the whims of 'her boys.'

So yesterday, I did a frantic phone around to various bee suppliers, trying to sound like I knew what I was talking about. There was common agreement that the weather this year hasn't helped at all. Cold, hot, cold, hot is not good for keeping your bees steady. But then, in response to my question, 'Do you have any mated queens available for re-queening now?' at last came the reply, 'we do actually,' and so the transaction was made, and I'm sitting in waiting for the postman to deliver a package marked 'Handle With Care - Live Bees in Transit'.

And then I've got to re-queen the hive. On my own, because Andy is at work. I rather like the advice in one book which suggests the method of a)removing old queen (this is bee-speak for 'squish the old queen to death' which I am not looking forward to), then b)heavily smoking the hive and c)'in the ensuing confusion, sneak her onto the middle frame.'

I can see it now. 'Go, queenie, go! Now, quick, whilst the rest of the gang are coughing their lungs up and gorging on honey.'

I am not going to adopt this method. It sounds a bit dodgy to me, and I suspect will result in two dead queens instead of one, thirty five quid up the spout and a bee-keeper sobbing into her gloves and banging her hive tool against the wall. I am going for the method of 'removing' old queen, leaving hive for a few hours so the rest of the bees realise they are queenless and therefore should welcome any new queen who happens by, then introduce new queen (who will be in her travel cage) to the middle frames, then cross my fingers and send up a prayer to the patron saint of bee-keeping that by the time the bees chew the queen out of her cage, they will quite like the smell of her pheremone and she'll be bursting to get laying and we'll have a whole new gang of baby bees in three weeks' time.

Before he left for work this morning, Andy said,' If you decide to do the requeening yourself, please be careful. Try not to get stung and have an anaphylactic shock. I know you've avoided being stung this year, but be careful nonetheless.'

'I'll be fine,' I said, although I am still trying to imagine the logistics of holding a frame with one gloved hand and trying to nip off the old queen with the other without dropping the whole caboodle and making everyone present VERY angry. I could dangle the frame in the nuc box, but the working space will be very tight, especially when as one will be togged up in bee-keeping garb. And I am very anxious about having to despatch the old queen, even though I know that if I don't then the whole colony will die out. She has tried, bless her, and I suppose it's not her fault that when she was supposed to be going on mating flights, the weather was rubbish and she didn't fancy going out on a date.

I don't know what's going to happen next. I mean, I didn't anticipate this dodgy start to our bee-keeping career, mostly because everyone in bee-keeping we've met this year has said, 'Oh, you won't have any trouble in your first year.'

HA!

Still, like a lot of my learning in life, being chucked in at the deep-end makes me get on with the job in hand, and shows me that when faced with a crisis, I can cope and not run around flailing my arms and screaming in wild panic!

But if you hear any screaming coming from the Kent area later today, that'll probably be me.