Queens, Birds and Sunshine

We're getting some warm Summer weather between the downpours. Good time of year to observe high levels of activity outside the hive or just go for a wander in one the city's many Cemeteries. With over 40 to choose from Sunnydale's got nothing on on Hull. One of the more interesting ones is on the corner of Springbank West and Chanterlands Avenue and with all those mature trees I'm sure my bees visit the place regularly -linked it back to bees seamlessly there.

Old part of Western Cemetery, a little haven for wildlife.

Some of the colonies have been busy with Supersedure, where they replace their Queen for reasons known only to themselves. Some beekeepers don't like it and prefer to replace the Queens themselves but I just let mine get on with it. The new Queens will be open mated wherever the local drone congregation area is, no idea where they are myself, and their offspring will be a mix of the drones' DNA and whatever the young Queen inherited. So basically these are mongrels. As bee breeds go there's a bit of a variety in my apiaries. Between my first colony and now I've purchased 4 colonies which I'm told were Buckfast and caught a few swarms of dark looking bees. I've also bough in a few Buckfast Queens in the past and one Dark European Bee Queen for a dark swarm who seemed to have gone queenless -those dark bees are a bit xenophobic so easiest to replace like with like for them. I'm fairly sure that most of my bees are various degrees of mongrel from whatever their original species was but you can see quite a variety looking the Queens. Some have very dark Queens that are clearly from European Dark Bee stock (Apis Mellifera Mellifera) whilst others look more like Buckfast varieties.

This Queen is very dark and slender as Queens go, let's call her Maleficent.

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Good Queen Chubbychops on the other hand looks closer to Buckfast.

The two Queens above look very different but both head up very placid colonies although whilst the dark bee's offspring are busy with their third super the lighter Queen's colony are still on their first.

Good Brood pattern from the Dark Queen

I'm still using drone culling to reduce Varroa numbers in the hives, and I often see bees bearding in the space below the shallow frame I leave for drone comb.

Bearding under a shallow frame

I'm using Commercial Brood boxes but a while ago moved some test frames from the colony I bought in May into one and they'd come on smaller National Frames. The bees used the space under one to draw brood comb which I've removed to control Varroa.

National Frame with brood comb built below it

Depending what you read a bee colony can be 10-15% drones in Summer and whilst removing these large sections of drone comb is probably a a setback for them I usually find them making a rows of drone brood  rows of drone cells towards the bottom of other frames anyway. My culled drone brood goes in the freezer to get cooked up later. I've read that the removed drone brood makes a great treat for the chickens but I don't give it to mine in case the scent draws bees to the birds.

There's more than just bees enjoying the sun

Loves is in the air

On Sunday the bees were making the most of the weather. The landing boards were busy with workers returning hopefully with honey sacs full of nectar or laden pollen baskets.

Returning foragers

I didn't open the hives though, we'd had a few days of rain so I decided it was better to leave them to replenish whatever stores they've used than interrupt their work with an inspection. As well as the workers charging in and out I also noticed a lot of Drones ambling out and a few returning. In the video below the Drones are easy to spot, they're larger than the workers and walk out very slowly compared to the workers.

Drones heading out.
They'll probably wind up as sex murder victims.

There were a few drones returning and wandering back into the hives so I'd assume they'ed just been out on orientation flights -having a fly about to figure out where they live, maybe locate the Drone Congregation Areas. Drone Congregation Areas are as the name suggests areas that Drones from various colonies hang out and Virgin Queens go to meet them. It's a bit of a mystery how they decide the areas but it seems to work for them and somehow they manage to avoid mating with Queens from their own colonies. After they mate they'll die from abdominal wounds. Strange to think each Queen bee happily laying eggs has probably killed about 15 Drones during her adolescence.

Reuniting the Artificial Swarm

Well my Artificial Swarm (AS) was making progress but then I made a mistake and to put it bluntly it all went a bit tits up. The AS technique I'd used involves a Snelgrove board which has six doors paired above and below the central board on three sides,  you manipulate these to filter flying bees back to the colony below. After the first four of five days there should be two doors open, as time goes on you close and open doors so the hive entrance(s) move around the board but you only ever have two doors open one to the colony below and one to the colony above.

The AS seemed to be going well, a queen cell had hatched in there and I figured things were looking peachy. I couldn't find her but that wasn't a surprise she would be quite small and still had to mate anyway. However last week whilst having a look to check on her elusive majesty's progress I found two doors open into the artificial swarm. I suspect one got opened by accident rather than left open in fact but the result seems to have been that they got robbed out. Mature bees from the parent colony below them, Hive2 and the nucleus seem to have gone in and taken all the stored food. Being made up of young bees the AS probably didn't do much by way of defending itself and with no mature bees to bring in new food there was a risk of starvation. I went through all eleven frames seeing lots of slow moving (presumably tired and hungry) workers and drones aimlessly wandering on empty comb and a few dead bees on the crownboard and Snelgrove board.

I was surprised to see some dead drones who appear to have mated and made it back to the hive what was left of their sexual organs protruding from their abdomens. I'm assuming they mated elsewhere and returned to the hive rather than mated in the hive with the queen who hatched who'd be their sister. Normally a queen bee flies further to mate than drones which should ensure she doesn't mate with her brothers yielding inbred bees. These two dead bees are actually very small for drones being about the same size as workers.

If these were human this image wouldn't be safe for work

I closed up the box and made up some thin sugar syrup which I then poured into a frame of empty comb so the workers could immediately start distributing it amongst themselves then closed up the hive. I couldn't see any sign of the queen, she may have been in there or she may have been killed during the robbing or lost as a result of manipulating th Snelgrove's doors. I later put a small feeder in an empty super above the AS to give them something to eat and decided to unite them back to the parent colony.

There's a few different ways to unite different bee colonies and the aim is to minimise fighting between them. I initially chose the newspaper method which is probably the most common and probably one of the simplest. Basically you slip a sheet of newspaper above the stronger of the two colonies and put the weaker one on top of that. In theory the bees will nibble through the newspaper and by the time they're through will have made enough contact with the bees in the other colony to consider them part of the same colony. Once united you then open the boxes and choose your eleven best frames to remain and remove the rest or go with a double brood colony.

Two colonies meeting over (and under) a newspaper

After 5 days the bees didn't seem to be taking any interest in the newspaper so I decided to speed things along by going to plan B. Plan B was what I think I'll call the Peppermint Technique. It's quicker than newspaper but probably more disruptive for the bees. Rather than waiting for the bees to gradually make contact by nibbling through paper you spray them with a peppermint spray and put the frames and bees from the one hive directly into the other. The spray obscures their scent and gives them something to do as they lick it off. By the time they've finished licking the spray the two colonies are used to each other.

The former David A. Cushman whose encyclopedic beekeeping website remains a handy resource notes he used to use a water spray with a Fox's Glacier Mint dissolved in it for this purpose. I made up some 1:1 syrup and mixed in a few drops of peppermint essential oil, I then decided it was too thick to spray and watered it down a lot.

I went out to the hives with a spare brood box to house the frames I'd be removing and my peppermint spray. I whipped off the artificial swarm it it's box and discovered I'd been a little quick to give up on Plan A. the bees had started chewing through the newspaper. Ah well next time I'll remember: more patience and less work.

Like myself, the bees were unimpressed with my colleague's choice of reading material

Going through the original brood box I removed 6 frames to the spare and the five remaining ones I pulled out and misted on both sides with the peppermint solution. I pulled five frames from the AS -the ones with the most bees on and stored syrup and misted them too before popping them in the original brood box. Bees left on the unused frames were shaken off and misted with peppermint then I put a crownboard on top of the brood box and a contact feeder with some 1:1 syrup in it to give them something to do and replaced the roof.

Combined colony and spare frames.

I now have 11 spare commercial sized frames some drawn and some not. I'll need to pop them into storage safe from wax moth at some point. Although I'm going to need some of them when I move the captured swarm from the nuc to a full sized brood box.

Beekeeper Eats Own Bees. Queen Is Not Amused.

Last weekend it was warm enough to properly inspect the hives. Turned out Hive2 had almost entirely filled their sacrificial drone comb and sealed almost all the cells so I was able to remove it and pop it in the freezer. This is done because varroa mites prefer to lay their eggs with the larger drone lavae than with workers, by sacrificing these developing drones beekeepers can physically remove large numbers of varroa from the colony and stop new mites hatching -if left unchecked the mites would weaken the colony to the point of collapse. Unlike ourselves bees are cold blooded and prettymuch grind to a halt as they cool down, on colder evenings you can sometimes see a bee or two stranded outside the hive coming to a stop till they warm up again next day -assuming nothing eats them in the night anyway, so freezing them is actually far more humane than it sounds.

Drone comb. After a week in the freezer.

It only needs 24 hours in the freezer to kill the occupants but I gave it week. The little white bits in the picture are uncapped cells containing drone larvae. Once frozen honeycomb becomes very brittle so I was able to break it up to remove the pupae and larvae.

Drone Larvae

The larvae look a lot like maggots. All they do is eat. They're normally very soft and delicate but frozen solid I was able to remove them whilst breaking up the comb. The trick was to work very fast and keep work on the comb a section at a time whilst I put the rest back into the freezer. If they defrosted and it'd been like trying to pick up vanilla ice cream with your fingertips.

Drone Pupae

Like a travelling salesman in a Kafka novella, which I haven't really read, the larvae undergo a metamorphosis. But unlike Gregor they become pupae before insects. With their white bodies and pink eyes they look like some kind of wierd honey bee vampire things. Aside from the protrusion of the cell caps from the comb the huge eyes are the giveaway that these are definitey drones and not workers.

I had a plan to count the varroa mites and drones in the comb to give me an idea how the colony was faring but having removed all the pupae and larvae I didn't actually spot a single mite. However just like faries, gods and Russel's Teapot just because you can't see something it doesn't mean it's not there, although I suspect in some of those cases it may not be. I think they may well have been frozen to the wax I was removing and the young mites may have been too small to spot or not even hatched from their eggs. Not a problem, they're out of the hive anyway. Now what to do with the dead larve and pupae? Well as the article title hints, with all the subtlety of a neon sign, I ate them.

242g of Drone Larvae, Pupae and a little wax

In the western world we don't eat insects. Well that's not really true. It's more accurate to say in the western world we like to think we don't eat insects, but we do. Remember that head cauliflower you bought last week from a large supermarket? Chances are it had a few dead passengers tucked away in it which you unknowingly enjoyed with your cauliflower cheese. Broccoli? Excellent source of vitamin C, iron and aphids. And it's not just the good stuff that includes a few things not on the ingredient list. Fancy a bar of chocolate? Well that'll probably contain some ground up bug life evenly distrubuted through out the whole bar. And have you actually looked at the bugs they have in cocoa growing countries? Moreish? They're proper chitin clad horror stories. Enjoy your Dairy Milk now. 8-D

Other cultures consider insects just another edible item on the great buffet table of life. They're low in fat, high in protein and far more environmentally friendly to farm than for example the pigs and cows which we're more used to seeing pieces of on our plates. Bee brood is about 80% protein whereas beef gets to about 60% -the bee brood is also far lower in fat too and has less ecological impact than the cow. Beef farming is a worryingly inefficient use of arable land. Bees on the other hand don't need any arable land at all. So, gross as the idea may be to our cultural sensibilities they're actually better for us and this great spinning rock we live on than our preferred protein sources. Entomophagy isn't entirely new to me, having previously cooked locusts and meal worms and bought cooked ants and the like from specialist suppliers. I've always thought it odd that whilst we'll decline a cricket that only eats living plants we'll happily pay through the nose for that carrion eating cockroach of the seabed, the lobster. It's all about the image and presentation I guess.

Right let's get off that soap box and back to the kitchen. Time to see what I can do with these dead baby boys :p I pulled out a couple of cookery books, in this case The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook and Creepy Crawly Cusine: The Gourmet Guide to Edible Insects. Three bee larvae recipes in one and one in the other. I opted for the simplest of the lot which is basically fry them in butter with a little salt and pepper for three minutes. Cooking doesn't really get much easier than that. Being drones I don't have to worry about stings or venom, they just don't have them.

Dub dub be dub dub dub
Golden brown texture like sun..

I decided to blanche them first by boiling them for a couple of minutes to remove any wax still adhering to them and as an extra step against bacteria -well we are talking about a pile of dead insects afterall. Then they were drained and fried in three batches with a drop of olive oil, a little Flora Light and a pinch of low sodium salt.

Well the proof is in the tasting so how where they? My housemate and I sampled them and TBH we were quite impressed. There was a nutty taste which reminded me of roasted giant ants -another eusocial insect and relative of the honey bee. Tasted slightly popcorny -possibly due to the flora? A little crunchy on the outside and softer on the inside. I served them up accompanied with boiled potatoes stir fried with chopped spring onion, tomato and black pepper, some baby spinach leaves and a dry beer to wash it down with.

Grub's up.

The Drones

The Drones were a mancunian punk band in the late seventies. In 1977 they released a 7" bearing the songs Bone Idol and I Just Wanna Be Myself. In the 80's a mate of mine bought a second hand copy of this at a market someplace and I still have a recording of it on a C90 somewhere, unfortunately I don't own a cassette player anymore so it's unlikely I'll be listening to them in the near future. They knocked out two studio albums and appeared on a couple of compilations before fading into obscurity so you can be forgiven for not having heard of them prior to reading this, shame really as Bone Idol was a pretty decent song and I'd've liked to have heard a bit more from them. Anyway this entry isn't really about them. It's about the other drones, male bees.

Looking at the comb over summer it was easy to spot several larger looking bees ambling about amongst the workers. I'm sure I'm not the first new beekeeper to have spotted a drone and thought it was the queen only to then see another five happily wandering about on the same frame and realise it's not her.

Workers and Drones on new foundation.

The drones are the two larger ones in the picture. Apart from being bigger than the workers they have a wider thorax and the abdomen has a rounded end whereas the worker bees are more pointy and wasplike. Whilst not quite so visible in the image drones have huge eyes extending from the sides of the head right over the top whereas workers have smaller ones on the sides of their heads. The reason for the drones' huge eyes are so that they can spot queen bees on mating flights. As the name suggests they make a very loud noise as they fly -well loud for a bee anyway.

Worker and Drone

The above pair were happy to pose together so we can compare the worker (on the left) and the drone (on the right). You can see the top of the drone's head is covered with it's compound eyes so it appears to be wearing a little bifurcated helmet. Honeybees actually have five eyes, the two large compound eyes that you can easily see and then three very small simple eyes in the middle of the head. The simple eyes seem to measure light levels. You can also see the worker has an abdomen tapering to a pointy end which houses a sting whereas the male has a very rounded end with some fuzzy hair just visible in the image. There's no sting on the drone. You can also make out that the legs are different on the drone to the worker, they're longer on the drone, presumably for hanging onto the Queen during matin.

The role drones play in a bee colony remains something of a mystery. They have some obvious jobs to do but  most of the time they just appear to be a burden on resrouces. Drones don't forage, they don't make wax, they don't draw wax, they don't feed larvae, they don't clean the hive, they don't do door security, it appears that they don't really do a lot -they don't even feed themselves if they can help it! Their most obvious role is mating with queen bees, given the number of queen bees in a normal colony (one) compared to the number of drones (a few hundred) the odds are seriously stacked against any individual drone ever performing this task -which may be just as well as they die with a ruptured abdomen shortly afterwards anyway. They quite probably have other roles that we just don't understand at present. What is known is that bee colonies seem to want to have a contingent of drones in their numbers. It has been suggested that given their larger size and noisy flight they may act as decoys to birds and other predators when a colony swarms. A potential predator seeing a swarm will probably go with the biggest fattest looking bee in the swarm which without the drones would be the queen. So perhaps the drone is a self sacrificing decoy. The loud noise they make could also be to attract predators.

To mate drone bees from different colonies go to congration areas, how they find them is quite a mystery bearing in mind that no drone lives longer than a single season so there's nobody passing the location along to next year's drones. Anyway the guys hang out at these congregation sites waiting for a queen. Eventually a virgin queen will emerge from a colony and fly over to the congregation zone too -maybe she hears the drone's noise? Once there she'll mate with about 17 drones, somehow they avoid mating with any from their own colony -no inbred two headed, three legged bees for us thanks. The reward for drones who have successfully mated with a Queen is a fatal ruptured abdomen, the queen goes back to her colony to spend the rest of her life in the dark laying eggs.

Drones that haven't mated live happily in the hive till it gets a little cooler at which point the worker bees stop feeding them and drive them out into the cold to die of hunger and exposure. Either way it's not a happy ending for the drone.

It's a bit of a mystery how the bees decide how may drones they need but it's something the worker bees seem to dictate rather than the queen. I read somewhere that a typical strong colony has between 400 and 600 drones. As drones are bigger they need slightly larger cells in the honeycomb. When the workers want drones they will make the larger comb if there is room but if there isn't the space they'll tear down some existing comb to make the larger cells. As the queen bee lays her eggs in empty cells she'll normally lay an egg in a worker cell and fertilise it which makes the egg female, when she reaches a  larger drone cell she lays an egg and doesn't bother to to fertilise it leaving it with half a set of chromosomes. Wierd eh? This will then hatch into a drone.

Normally drones make up a small portion of the colony population, however sometimes things go wrong and drone  numbers increase. Sometimes a queen will start laying only or mostly drones -this is called a 'drone laying queen' and can be rectified by removing the queen (squish!) and replacing her with a new one. The other instance when a drone population will increase is when there is no queen and worker bees start laying eggs. Worker bees never get to mate so their eggs are never fertilised which means theirs always hatch into drones. At this stage the colony is pretty much knackered and the normal thing to do is empty the colony on the ground in the hope that non laying workers will find their way into other existing hives to bump up their workforce.

Worker cells above, drone cells below.

As the drones have bigger cells this makes them useful in the fight against the Varroa Destructor mite. The mite's prefer to lay their eggs in drone cells as there's more room ion the cell and a bigger larvae for the mites to feed on. Beekeepers can take advantage of this by encouraging the bees to make drone comb on a specific frame then when the drone larvae in their cells have been capped to begin the metamorphosis into actual bees the keeper can take away the comb and all the mites it contains. This is a technique usually referred to as "Sacrificial Drones" or "Sacrificial Drone Comb" as basically the developing drones are sacrificed to cull the mites.

Whilst the workers will tear out worker cells to make drone comb they can also be directed to make drone cells where the beekeeper can more easily access them. It's very simple to do. The beekeeper places at one end of the brood box a frame of foundation which is only half the height of the brood box. The bees then make their new drone comb hanging from the bottom of this frame.

Drone comb being made underneath a shallow frame.

This means that not only can the beekeeper easily locate the drone comb but it can be easily removed. Once removed it goes into the freezer to kill the larvae and the mites alike so they can later be counted giving the keeper some idea of scale of the the colony's mite problem. Killing them in the freezer is actually far more humane than it sounds. Bees aren't hot blooded like we are, in the evenings stray bees in the garden can be seen to grind to a halt as the temperature drops, if it doesn't drop too low they can be seen moving again in the mornings.