I hate killing bees by accident, but it happens. There are so many of them running around unpredictably and there are so many heavy parts of a hive that it's almost inevitable that a bee or two will get squished no matter how careful I am. It still makes me feel bad.
The queen is especially not something I ever want to kill, accidentally or otherwise. Only once have I considered killing one on purpose, and even contemplating it was nearly unbearable.
Here's the thing: My hives are in an area that is still relatively safe from the aggressive Africanized (“killer”) bees. In the cool climate of the San Francisco area, where it only rarely gets above the low 70s, the hope is that it's too cold for the heat-loving bees to thrive and completely take over the local population as has been a more realistic fear for the hotter part of the state, only a few hundred miles south and east of here. However, just because they might not thrive here doesn't mean they can't live here long enough to spread some of their genes into local groups.
In early summer, one of my hives started giving me trouble. Bees from it began attacking me before I even got close, while I was working a hive on the far end of my bee yard, or even while I was hanging up clothes. To go in required a great deal of courage. I made the mistake of letting my most fearless apprentice help me work it one day. She had never been stung before, but this time, the bees noticed her black socks before I did and within a few seconds she got three quick stings on the ankle. (Never wear dark fuzzy anything when working bees—they think you're a bear or something.) She retreated, having lost her enthusiasm about bees, and I was left alone with the monsters as they buzzed angrily at the net that covered my face. These weren't just warning buzzes and butts; they were trying for my tender spots like the lips, nose, and eyes.
I made a quick inspection of the honey stores, was too concerned about my apprentice and my own well being to go deeper, and quickly closed up the hive again. At least a dozen angry bees followed me fifty feet to the back door, which is really unusual, and a few of them followed me inside, which is unheard of. That was bad. What was worse was hearing shrieks of horror an hour later—a few of the bees began aggressively buzzing a housemate as she emerged from her car, 100 feet and the opposite side of the house from the bee yard.
This wasn't good. This hive had gone from “having a bad day” grouchy to dangerous. Considering the various possible explanations, I decided the most likely was that perhaps a new queen had gotten its genetics mixed with drones from a hyperaggressive, maybe Africanized, hive. Whatever the case, things had gotten to a point that I'd have to find the queen and replace her with a gentler one. Part of the process of getting the aggressive bees to accept a new queen required the death of the hive's present queen. I didn't want to do it, but after consulting with other beekeepers, I didn't seem to have a choice. I felt like a cowboy having to shoot a favorite horse, but I felt like I had no choice, that sometimes a beekeeper's got to do what a beekeeper's got to do, etc.
Well, to make a long story short, after an elaborate, several-stage intervention to make it possible to find the queen without being stung to death, I discovered the real reason the hive was acting so aggressively. The huge hive didn't have a bad queen; it didn't have any queen at all. Apparently, the original queen had left with a swarm, and something had happened to the new queen that had hatched to replace her. (Quite probably she had been hit by a fast-moving truck or picked out of the air by a bird when she left the hive seeking to mate.) There was no queen, and no brood or eggs left to grow a new one, and the bees were in a surly, excitable, nihilistic mood. I borrowed a few frames with eggs and brood from my gentlest hive so they could grow a new queen, and the presence of brood and the hope of having a new queen immediately brought the angry anarchists back to their normal, peaceful selves.
Complaint/Suggestion Ticket #338h3N0H
RE: Queen Succession Defect—IMMEDIATE ATTENTION!
Dear bee programmers,
Much of your work is absolutely first rate. Really! But there is one “bug” in your bugs that I really am surprised you haven't fixed by now, and I really hope you'll take care of in the upgrades. No, this isn't the sting problem, in which the guard bees automatically die when they sting. Yes, I still think that's a serious flaw. (What a waste. Do rattlesnakes die after only one bite?) And, yes, I am still underwhelmed by your response of “that's a hardware problem and we don't handle those,” but this is even more serious, something that has doomed entire hives to oblivion when the predictable happens.
Here's the problem: the queen bee succession issue. As you know, here's the procedure when worker bees decide it's time to replace their queen and mother with one of their sisters. They grow several new queens in queen cups hidden around the hive. That's great, redundancy and all that. But what happens next? The first queen that emerges immediately goes about stinging the other queens to death while they're still trapped inside their queen cups. That's weird enough, but the other queens actually help her in the process, “piping” a high-pitched call that essentially means, “Here I am! Come and kill me!”
That's wasteful, even in the best of situations. I mean, why can't there be more than one queen? A hive with several queens would be much stronger. It's not as if they'd engage in power struggles, because they aren't really queens but are more like glorified egg layers. If the queens are sisters, why can't they just be programmed to get along and lay eggs side by side?
Okay, maybe that's beyond your programming abilities. How about at least reworking the sequence a little? Because, as you know, the queen kills off all of her rivals before she makes her mating flight. Now all of the hive's eggs are in one basket, both figuratively and literally. If the original queen has died or gone eggless, there's barely enough time to grow a new queen from one of her larvae, and if that doesn't work out, then there's a problem. A big problem, as in the survival of the entire hive is at stake.
Here's what really needs to be changed: Don't have her kill off her rivals so quickly. Don't have the long knives come out before she makes her mating flight. You know what can happen out there. She can get lost, get caught in a spider web, get picked off by a blue jay, or end up splattered on a windshield. If that happens, all those carefully programmed redundancies are for naught.
Even if she survives, there's a chance that she'll end up being infertile for some reason. That's why I make these recommendations, if you're really married to the “one queen per hive” model:
I realize this might be beyond your skills and budget. Thanks, though, for considering my ideas.
Best, Jack Mingo
What did Sherlock Holmes do when he retired? Elementary, my dear Watson. He moved to Sussex and became a beekeeper, according to His Last Bow, Arthur Conan Doyle's last collection of Holmes stories:
“But you had retired, Holmes. We heard of you as living the life of a hermit among your bees and your books in a small farm upon the South Downs.”
“Exactly, Watson. Here is the fruit of my leisured ease, the magnum opus of my latter years.” He picked up the volume from the table and read out the whole title, Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen. Alone I did it. Behold the fruit of pensive nights and laborious days, when I watched the little working gangs as once I watched the criminal world of London.”
For many years, the bank located at 221B Baker Street in London employed a full-time secretary to answer letters from people asking Sherlock Holmes for help. Along with those letter writers, I only wish Holmes had been real and had indeed written that book. Bee behavior is still sometimes maddeningly mysterious; his keen skill at observation and deduction would have been very welcome indeed.