You’ve followed all the beekeeping rules, and you’re looking forward to your next hive inspection. But when you open your hive, things don’t quite seem right. The bees appear agitated and maybe even aggressive, and there doesn’t seem to be...
Many beekeepers, new and experienced alike, struggle to find the queen. It’s a skill that can and should be developed as early as possible in your beekeeping journey. There are generally between 30-60 thousand bees in a hive. Trying to...
Sweet Rewards of the Honey Harvest As an apiarist, you’ve made quite an investment in the equipment and supplies needed to successfully raise bees, especially if this is your first season. With the bees working overtime to take advantage of...
Long live the queen. And queen bees do live long – somewhere between 3 to 5 years (although some estimates stretch it to 9). Compared to the worker bee, which reaches the end of her life cycle somewhere around the 42-day mark, she might as well live for a bee-time eon. But whether it’s by disease, old age, natural disaster, or beekeeper murder (which, under certain circumstances, is recommended), at some point or other, the queen must die.
What then? Do the worker bees riot? Does chaos erupt, and the hive plunge into anarchy? After all, the queen bee is the only bee in the hive fully capable of producing offspring (at the upwards rate of one egg per minute, no less). Though worker bees are physically capable of laying unfertilized eggs (which hatch into male drones by way of parthenogenesis), this rarely occurs. There are two main reasons. The first is to do with the queen’s particular perfume – the spread of which convinces the colony they are “queenright”. It is a powerful pheromone, with various physiological effects – one of which is to cause the eggs inside of all the other females to wither and die (an example of “programmed cell death”). It’s as though she’s putting all her lower-ranked sisters on the pill just by existing.
