AWOL Queen Peggy

It's been a little while since my last post. I wanted to come to you with great news from the hive, of Peggy, our new queen laying away and bringing up lots of happy bee babies. Not so my friends, not so.

We chose a method of requeening the hive, where we placed Peggy into a little cage that was blocked with food at one end. The clever idea is, you place her on a frame in the brood box where all the laying takes place. In the time it takes her to eat through the food and go waddling off round the hive to start her reign, the bees will have gotten used to her pheromones and won't bump her off as an impostor.

So she was put in and left to munch away to her heats content. Kind of like a woman in a room full of cake.

But on the next inspection, she was gone. There was no sign of her on the frames and there were no eggs to speak of. So it looks like she emerged and the current hive turned on her. Poor Peggy! I'm gutted for her, I feel like we sent he to her death to face 60000 murderous bitches. Can you imagine?!

So we are back to square one. We have another queen arriving soon and hopefully we will have more success this time round. However, if they continue to act like she devils then we will move on to plan B. Which I will of course blog about should it happen. In the mean time, here is a link to a great song in memory of Peggy, queen of our Vic though short! http://youtu.be/HELofmbpDM0

The Queen is Dead, Long live the Queen!

I've refrained from posting about our hive for a couple of weeks now, because our queen went AWOL. For those that are totally new to beekeeping reading this, one of the main reason's for opening the hive and checking through each frame of comb is to find the queen. You need to check she is laying by spotting very very tiny white eggs in the cells and also check that the worker bees are not raising a new queen.

If the workers are raising a new queen, they build the grub a palace (Queen cell - see pic) and feed that grub Royal Jelly. Yes girls, Royal jelly isn't just a gift set of smellies you get from boots at Christmas for your grandma. It's an actual substance with and actual function. If these queen cells start popping up all over your frames, it can usually be a sign that the hive could be getting ready to split and swarm... or your queen's reign has ended and she's popped her clogs. If she is still alive and kicking, you can knock these queen cells down to avoid a new queen hatching and the hive swarming off to start a new colony. However, if she is not laying you can leave these cells and the hive will crown a new queen. (Usually they raise a few and the first one to hatch goes on a murderous rampage and kills all the other unhatched queens... BITCH FIGHT!)

This is the tricky bit, there could be a cross over period. So the queen could die just before you open the hive. You spot eggs, brood cells etc and just assume you have missed the illusive lady amongst the other 60K+ bees. Then merrily go forth and knock down the queen cells. This is when a Jeremy Kyle (Jerry Springer for any American readers) state of affairs ensues and the babies are left without a mummy. This is exactly what happened to us :-(

So the past couple of weeks have been spent planning the coronation of our new queen, flown over from Greece and landing in...... Oswestry last Thursday.

She's in the hive, safe and sound in a little cage for now so the worker bees can get used to her pheromones and not bump her off for being a trespasser.

I ran a competition on Facebook last week to name her and can now reveal that she has been crowned... Queen Peggy. Well done Kathy, I'll get some Honey over to you at the end of the summer :-)