Dealing With Quirky Queens (150)

Episode 150 – Dealing With Quirky Queens

Jim Tew: Good week, podcast listeners, it's a beautiful Friday here, it's a good time to talk about bees again. I'm in the mood for it, I need a weekly fix. Anne Frey is here with me, we're going to talk for a while, if you're up to it, on some secrets about queens. They're not always secrets so much as they are just issues. What can you do with them? When do they go wrong? Anne, are you okay talking about this?

Anne Frey: Sounds good, Jim. It's a favorite topic of mine.

Jim: A favorite topic, poor queens is a favorite topic of yours. Well, that's good, I can deal with poor queens. Thank you for being here, thank you for being here. Hi, I'm Jim Tew from Honey Bee Obscura.

Anne: I'm Anne Frey from Better Bee.

Jim: Today the two of us are going to slog through some issues about queens that maybe are sometimes better left unsaid or maybe should be said more often.

Introduction: You are listening to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the folks behind Beekeeping Today Podcast. Each week on Honey Bee Obscura, hosts Kim Flottum and Jim Tew explore the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honey bees in today's world. Get ready for an engaging discussion to delight and inform all beekeepers. If you're a long-timer or just starting out, sit back and enjoy the next several minutes as Kim and Jim explore all things honey bees.

Jim: From Better Bee, thank you so much for being here. I know you've got a real job and you have real bee colonists to work. Here we are sitting where we're supposed to hop up 5 minutes for every 30 minutes to keep our blood flowing. I'd like to talk with you for a few minutes about some of the issues that you've seen throughout the years. Let's compare notes on some of the things that queens can do that we wish they wouldn't do.

Anne: I do see a lot of queens because we create a lot of nucs, and we sometimes use cells and sometimes mated queens. I'm lucky that I see dozens of queens every day. I may have seen more than the average hobbyist has been able to cite in their few visits each summer to their own hives.

Jim: The thing I feel, if I pay all this money for a bug, figuratively speaking, a bug, then she ought to just be world-class. This has got to be a really deluxe bug I've bought. Too often, things can simply go wrong, specifically and in no particular order of complaint. I paid good money for a queen and when I got home and was going through the process of introducing her, I noticed that this beautiful little animal was missing the tarsal claw, the whole bottom of her foot on her middle leg. What would that be? The metatarsal leg on her middle leg.

She just walked on a stump. I own this queen. It's my queen. There's no guarantee. I can't drive 35 miles back and get another one. I went ahead and put her in and she stayed for a while, but I don't remember if it had a happy ending or not. Who buys a queen with a bum leg? Jim Tew did, apparently. Sometimes you see this, the queen's been through a lot, getting put in the cage and struggling and fighting amongst her rivals, and somewhere in the process, she managed to lose a leg.

Anne: Sometimes in the cage, if she's walking on the screen and the bees in the queen bank are fussy about things, they'll grab onto her foot and hurt her even though she's protected in her queen cage, supposedly. It's interesting that you notice such detail when you got the queen because most people would just get it, install it, and later on wonder what happened to her if they notice at all.

Jim: Thank you for saying that. I'll take that as a compliment. It's so hard to find compliments, but I'll take it as one. I can't tell you that I was observant enough to watch what happened to her. After a while, you've got other colonies, and seasons pass and you forget. She was replaced. I can't say that it was really prompt.

Just quickly, we need to get off this, but I do wonder, how do the workers examine her? What little worker bee had the idea, "Oh, my stars, this queen is lame, we've got to replace her," how do bees have that thought? Don't go down that rabbit hole, Anne, because I have no idea who diagnosed this queen productivity in the colony.

Anne: I could only speculate on that. There's some kind of a pain or stress signal given off by the queen if she's got an injury and they detect that. I know if it's one of her front feet, it would probably be actually affecting her performance in a constant way because she needs to put her front feet down in the cell to check it out before she's going to decide if it's good to lay an egg in.

Jim: Well, I gave you a queen quirk. You give me a queen quirk. Now, what have you seen that is an oddity that you didn't know you were paying for?

Anne: A couple of times in the past five years or so, since I've ramped up my beekeeping coming to Better Bee here is I've seen queens faint occasionally. It's about one queen a year. I witness a fainted queen, and it's not quite as funny as a fainting goat.

Jim: [laughs] Well, I've never seen a goat faint, but I was going to say happily, I have seen a queen faint. You know what happens when the queen faints? I have the same impulse because you think, "Oh, my stars, I just killed my $35 queen. How did I do that?" She's lying in your hand dead-

Anne: Stiff.

Jim: -and then while you're doing that, you see a little spasm, a little tick, and you think, "Well, maybe-- is she still dying, or is she still waking up?" She came back around and I'm happy to tell you that both the queen and I survived that experience, but you're right. It's for me about once every two years. I don't see as many queens as you do anymore.

Anne: The first time I saw it happen, someone was with me who was more experienced, and he calmed me down. I've done that calming routine with my helpers a few times and just told them, "Lay her down in a place where you can protect her, and then check back every one or two minutes," and it usually just takes five or six minutes, and she's back walking around again.

Jim: Well, in my defense, just so you know, I had a good reason to panic because I have seen two pieces of burr comb go back together to refit after you pull two frames out. I've seen my queen's abdomen trapped between those two pieces, and I've seen that abdomen explode-

Anne: Oh.

Jim: -when I put them back together, and all you can do is say, "Well, that was not good. I found queens stuck in the treads on the bottom of my boot." When that queen is knocked out in my hand, I have reason for thinking, "Oh, my stars, I've just screwed up again."

I'd like to give you one that bothered me for a while. Just a couple of years ago, a beautiful queen, great personality, nice smile, everything about this queen was deluxe except she mostly laid drone brood, a beautiful drone pattern. Everything else about her was photogenic.

Anne: She stuck to the pattern, but she laid drones.

Jim: I was so caught off guard, and I'm such a marginal beekeeper in reality when it comes to being prompt. I thought, "Well, as beautiful as she is, get a few photographs. Show the drone brood as best you can, and then she's got to go." Well, a week passed, two weeks passed, and you're back in the colony again, and there may be a little bit of worker brood showing up. Not to drag this story out, within about three weeks, the pattern began to change, and then within a month, five weeks it was like it never happened.

She was just really producing a nice worker pattern. Well, she came just a click and a half away from death when she started out that way, but that was one time the queen did go through a transition and began to lay a really nice brood pattern. I have no idea why.

Anne: It might've been that she was actually walking around on comb that already had that drone brood, or do you think maybe she was just getting her plumbing in order, and she wasn't sending a sperm down the chute quite when she should have?

Jim: I'm going to go with getting her plumbing in order. I like the way you worded that. That is a sophisticated, complex, elegant system, and something needed tweaking, but she got it right. I don't have any idea because I wish I could say my comb is all drawn, and I've got it organized, but really my comb is my comb. Whatever the bees build is whatever I use three to five years before it goes away. Well, you've been very helpful so far. Let's take a short break and hear from our sponsor, and we'll come right back, and I'll keep on challenging you.

Anne: Sounds good, Jim.

[music]

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Jim: Anne, it's your time for a quirk. You tell me what you've

seen that seems to be an oddity that beekeepers may want to know how to deal with.

Anne: That getting her plumbing in order thing, it reminded me of another oddity that I see every spring, which is multiple eggs in the cells. A while back when I was trying to set up a presentation about queens and was looking for pictures of laying workers to show people the difference, every photo I found on the internet that was purporting to show laying worker-laid eggs was actually showing multiple queen-laid eggs in a cell. I've witnessed a queen laying eggs multiply in my observation hive long ago. A person I bought the queen from on the phone as I was panicked said, "Don't worry, Anne, she's just young and she has to grow out of doing that. It'll be about one week and you'll see everything just fine." He was right.

Jim: I love every part of that discussion because once again, you're a bee guy, you're a bee person, and you are responsible for this hive, this colony. Here this queen is either-- got laying workers, do I have laying workers with the queen? Everything's a question, not really any answers anywhere. Just stay calm, give her a few days to get this sorted out.

While you were telling that, I sit here as a bee biologist wondering, the workers must have eaten the excess eggs. I don't know if that larvae-- help me out, do larvae have the mouth parts? They wouldn't eat, they're only eating liquid food, aren't they? They're not going to eat the extra eggs.

Anne: I would think that the workers do all of the cleanup and organizing when there's multiple eggs. I've also seen two larvae in one cell or a larva and an egg in a cell in these cases, and taken pictures or video. I love getting the pictures and the video whenever I see anything odd.

Jim: I'm with you on that. When I used to graft a lot raising queens, I would not commonly but frequently see two graftable larvae in the same-- You think, well, they're going to move one of those because or, you'll come back and there won't be anything there. We like to think that bees are little computers, and they just click, click, click, and get it all done. They screw up a lot, I suppose. That's a good example. Let's keep going down this pathway because it's not always easy to tell if it's laying workers or a brand-new pumped-up queen. What else have you seen in this regard?

Anne: It is confusing sometimes, especially if the comb depth isn't full-depth cells because laying workers can lay their eggs deep down at the base. What I mean is backed by what you would call the foundation surface of the cell. If it's not fully drawn, they can reach their abdomens in there. Normally, the queen's the only one that can reach way down and lay way, way, way down there. Multiple eggs or multiple larvae down there is due to the queen.

The other things I've seen are that these queens laying multiple eggs is typically a springtime thing when the hive is thriving. Laying worker issues doesn't look like a thriving hive. It looks like a dwindling hive. A person that sees multiple eggs, whether they're listeners to this podcast and learned about this or not, they have to use their heads and think, "Would this thriving booming colony look like this if it had only laying workers laying eggs? Am I seeing worker brood or am I only seeing drone brood? Laying workers would only produce drone brood."

Jim: That is a good point. If the hive seems in balance every other way, spring of the year, worker brood, and the hive has its ambiance where it feels like a spring beehive, you know the feeling, and there are multiple eggs there, then just stay calm, especially if it's a new queen. You can have laying workers all the time, but the bees are going to clean it up, maintain it, and make the colony look better. Even if it is laying workers, just a few, they're going to get it under control.

Anne: Yes, there's always a few laying workers.

Jim: Yes, it's going to be a queen that's just turbocharged, not enough cells cleaned, not enough worker bees, the balance in the colony yet is not where it should be. It'll even out and that colony will take off.

Anne: It also might be that the brood area is really crowded up with nectar and pollen incoming, and she's cycling around and she can't find empty cells to lay in, and she's just like gung-ho youngster queen, and she's laying an egg or two on top of a pollen, just adding more eggs where there's already eggs laid. It might be a crowded situation too.

Jim: While you were talking, I was thinking that in beekeeping, I guess like in life, patience is a

virtue. If a queen anomaly with a queen that you've just installed, she's just becoming established, and you pick up some artifact, would it be unkind to say just back off and breathe in a bag for maybe three to five days or so?

Anne: Yes, I like that.

Jim: See if the bees can straighten this. Don't snatch that queen out right then and send her to hive heaven, and then make the investment in yet another queen because she's probably going to come in with some oddity too. This whole process is like a surgical procedure, it's not exact, and just give the bees a chance to fix it themselves.

Anne: Yes, I think three to five days, no more than three weeks. Things aren't going to turn around if they didn't turn around in a couple of weeks. Three weeks is the limit that I would wait for something, and that being the length of the worker brood cycle, it's the end of things. If you don't have brood by the end of that. A pause and thinking, definitely always good, in life too. Normal life.

Jim: [laughs] I'll scratch that here on my wall, and I'll read this periodically. It's a good comment. A pause in life is a good thing. I wish I could get off the merry-go-round every now and then, but I can't. There's so many things we could talk about, spotty patterns. I've had some really good colonies, productive, populous, and just an ugly pattern, missing a lot of cells. You think, is that a defective queen? Is that the workers cleaning up? Is that heater holes, those wintering structures that are sometimes used? While you're looking at that, just put the colony back together and go to the next one because we're never going to have all the beehives in our yard absolutely perfect. There's going to always be guacamole, good ones here, bad ones there. There's always something.

Anne: You say guacamole, I say bell curve.

Jim: I like the bell curve, that sounds more technical. Send people to the webpage to find out exactly how the bell curve fits into beekeeping queen anomalies. How do you handle this one? A clumsy old beekeeper, I don't want to call any names, tried to mark his queen. After I marked innumerable queens, I just missed the target.

Anne: What'd you hit?

Jim: Got a paint dollop up on part of the wings and on the back one of the ocelli. You think, well, you still want to try to wipe that off? That was really clumsy.

Anne: It's not as bad as it could have been.

Jim: At least I didn't puncture the queen. Some of these issues I cause. In that case, just me missing my target, as you gently rolled in my thumb and forefinger, I missed my target and dolloped my spot of paint in the wrong place. I went ahead and put her in and she roamed around there, just like the other queen. I don't know what happened to her, but I screwed that one up on my own, but at least that was no mystery. I know what happened there. Beekeeper incompetence reared his head.

Anne: You can own that.

Jim: I've enjoyed talking to you about this. How do we want to leave this? I want to say again that a lot of this will abate with experience, repetition. A future topic you've suggested was the goodness of repetition in beekeeping. Even though we haven't talked about that yet, I love that topic. Once you've been in the yard over and over and over again, and you've seen these queens, seen these queens, seen these queens, you begin to get a calmness. You get a resoluteness. You know things can go wrong, but you know many times they correct themselves.

Anne: Yes. It's like when I complain to my sister-in-law who makes great pies that I can't make a great pie. She says, "Well, you only make one every Thanksgiving," and then it's the next year. I was like, "Yes, it's always like the first time for my pie-making attempt." More experience, yes. Visit people, shadow people that are more experienced than you. Do as much as you can and you'll learn more.

Jim: Anne Frey from Better Bee, I've enjoyed talking with you and I want to say this. Just see if I can hem you in some. I hope we can do it again sometime on a different subject.

Anne: Sounds good, Jim.

Jim: It's always good to talk to a competent beekeeper.

Anne: Thanks.

Jim: See, there's hope for me.

Anne: Me too.

Jim: All right. Anne, until we can talk again some other time, bye-bye.

Anne: Bye, Jim.