Imported Royalty

As soon as I thought the hive may be queenless I started looking online for a new queen but nobody could supply one for a month. Whilst I waited I observed the existing brood hatching and eventually even the drones had hatched too but still no eggs were being laid. Of course if I had 2 hives I could just transfer a frame with eggs into the hive and let the bees deal wth it, but I only have the one hive. Eventually I ordered a new Buckfast queen from Fragile Planet. They rang to verify delivery days as obviously you can't leave a queen bee in a box in your local sorting office for a week till you pick it up and the lady was delivered.

Except she wasn't. Quite. My housemate texted me at work to let me know a 'While you were out' elivery card had come through the door so in my half hour lunchbreak I drove home got the card and went to my sorting office. I was lucky and the parcel had got there before me so I was handed a cardboard box with two finger sized holes in the sides and a warning about live bees written in big letters. I wondered about the two large air holes but it turned out the queen and ger attendant bees were in a tiny plastic queen cage taped to the inside of the box.

The new queen was marked with a dot of white paint to show she was hatched in 2011. Other than that she looked suspiciously like a worker bee. As queens go she was something of a midget.

I've read that delivered queens are often dehydrated upon arrival so I dribbled some sugar water over one end of the cage, popped it back in the box and left it in a darkened room whilst I went back to work. In the afternoon when I got back again I opened the hive and pushed the cage into the honeycomb. I put it with the opening pointing upwards so that if the attendant workers died before being released their dead bodies wouldn't trap her in the cage.

Five days later I opened the hive and removed the empty cage. By my reckoning the hive was queenless for 4 weeks before I added the new queen so I was a bit concerned about laying workers and so on. I couldn't see the queen at all but to be honest with her being a such a midget I wasn't too surprised, I also suspect the white paint doesn't shows up particularly well in the hive and it may even have rubbed off her anyway. However I did find that something had been laying eggs in there so I'm fairly confident she's survived and been accepted.